P.'l'lcla PaclV

SCOTT FITZGER~LO'S E~RLV FICTION AND FEMININITV

0ep81'tmant Dr Engl1lh

Melt81' or Al'tl

ln Fltagal'ald'. a81'lv 'letlon, tha girl ls the

Imaglnatlvs cantre. As tha qulnteasanca Dr youth, baautV.

Innocence. laI.e1th and populsl'ltV. 8he lait bath tha ambodlmant

or the ,:a.rleen Ol'aem and tha Feil' Haralne. litas" thle lmags

1. threatanad. aa lt la by .... m81'1'1eoa DI' tha radlng Dr

her aaBata. lt cDl1epeea end the girl bacGmea tha embadlment

Dr the American nlghtmara end tha Uerk Harolne. As a reault

Or thle a.eggarstlon or the glr1'8 power, th.re lB e virtuel

exchange of roles: the men retreete From the girl, ehrlnks

'ram axperlence, tekae refuge ln the home, end eccapt~ en

ln ferlaI' position whlle tha girl aeeka the man, embreces a.­

perlencs. maves 'rom tha home to tha office, Bnd BCQulrae the

dominent l'ole. The girl, howaVDI'. 1ucks tha mantal end phyalcal

8trength to rulr11l thle role end thua enda, llka the men, ln

daapelr and rutn.

i

• TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT 1

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION l

CHAPTER II THE AMERICAN DAEAM AND THE FAIR HEROINE 18

CHAPTER III THE AMERICAN NIGHTMARE AND THE DARK HEROINE . . J8

CHAPTER IV. ROLE REVERSAL 59

CHAPTER V CONCLUSION 84

INDEX TO ABBREVIATIONS 88

BIBLIOGRAPHV 89

il

SCOTT FITZGERALD'S EARLY FICTION

AND FEMININITV

by

Patricia Elizabeth Pace y

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE.

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF.

Master of Arts

in the Department

of

English

McGill University

July, 1969

1 @ Patricia Elizabeth Pacey 1970 î;

SCOTT FITZGERALD'S EARLY FICTION

AND FEMININITY

I?atricia Pacey

CHA~TER l

INTRODUCTION

From the earliest prep-school story to the last,

unfinished novel, the focal point of Scott Fitzgerald's vision

is the American girl. In his own time, Fitzgerald was an

immensely contemporary and an immensely popular writer, but

what one recalls about his work is not his vivid picture of

the twenties, the parties, the roadsters, nor even the money -

50 much as the girl. For his critics, this association was

a vital though an unconscious one. In 1945, Malcolm Cowley

wrote: "it was as if all his novels, described a big dance

to which he had taken ••• the prettiest girl."l John O'Hara,

writing in the same year, said of This Side of Paradise: "1

cannot refrain ••• from comparing my first and countless'

lMalcolm Cowley, "Third Act and Epilogue", f. Scott Fitzgerald, A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Arthur Mizener, (Englewood Cliffs, 1963), p. 66.

2.

subsequent meetings with that book to a first and subsequent

meetings with The Girl."2 More recent1y and 1ess romantica11y,

Les1ie Fied1er has written: "Fitzgerald has come to seem more

and more poignant1y the girl we 1eft behind - dead to boot,

before we returned to the old homestead, and particu1arly

amenable to sentimental idea1ization."3

The identification of Fitzgerald with The Girl is

so strong that Fitzgerald, himse1f, confessed to his secretary,

"1 am ha1f feminine - at least my mind is. • • • Even my

Feminine characters are Feminine Scott Fitzgera1ds."4 His

secretary, as have countless other females, conceded that he

"understood women." There is a pronounced Feminine quality

to his work - his style is delicate, graceful and ethereel and

his subject matter shows traces of a Feminine mind. Edmund

Wilson, his Princeton friend and literary mentor, described

this quality: "For a person of his mental agility, he is

extraordinarily little occupied with the general affairs of

the world: 1ike a woman, he Is not much given to abstract or

2John D'Hara, "Introduction", The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York, 1945), p. VII.

3Leslie Fiedler, "Some Notes on F. Scott Fitzgerald", F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Collection of Critical Essavs, ed. Arthur Mizener, (Englewood Cliffs, 1963), p. 70.

4Andrew Turnbu11, Scott Fitzgerald, (New York, 1962), p. 259.

3.

impersonal thQught. n5 He has an uncanny ability to proj~ct

himself into women's lives. In his short stories and novels,

he often adopts the point of view of the heroine and does so

in a convincing manner. When he decided to have Cecilia Brady

narrate the story of rh! ~ Tycoon, he wrote to his editor,

"Cecilia is the nerrator because 1 think 1 know exactly how

6 such a person would react to my story.n Indeed, if one did

not know the sex of the author, one might conceivably guess it

to be female. Comparing his writing with the consciously mas­

culine fiction of Hemingway is like comparing the fragile,

intricate lacework of a spider's web with the strong, firm

framework of steel scaffolding.

Fitzgerald considered his audience to be largely

feminine. He counted on)andlater attributed the phenomenal

sale of This .2!!:!.! f!f. Paradise to lthe American debutante:. "1

know l'Il wake sorne night and find that the debutantes have

made me famous overnight.,,7 Comparing the financial success of

The Great Gatsby and Tender is ~ Night, his basis was the

relative appeal of each to this same feminine audience:

5Edmund Wilson, IIF. Scott Fitzgerald", F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Arthur Mizener,(Englewood Cliffs, 1963), p. 70.

6Charles E. Shain, F. Scott Fitzgerald (Minnéapolis, 1967), p. 19.

7 Andrew Turnbull, ed., The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 343.

4.

l don't think there is a comparison between this book and The Great Gatsby as a seller. The Great Gatsby had against it--­its length and its purely masculine interest. This book, on the contrary, i5 a woman's book. l think given a decent cha~ce, it will make its own way insofar as fiction is se1ling under present conditions. B

Much of his inferior writing was deliberately aimed at the

american female; he was a regular contributor to women '9 magl:=!-

zines such as Ladies' Home Journal, Vanitv ~, McCall's, and

Woman's Home Companion. In these articles, his favorite topics

were himself and his wife, ~elda, the domination of children

by their parents or by women in the culture.

Fitzgerald's female audience was a receptive one -

so receptive that man y began to model themselves on his fictional

portraits. The appeal of his heroines was so strong that his

early work, as he himself put it, "created a new type of

American girl.,,9 Rightly or wrongly, Fitzgerald has been

credited with the phenomenon of the "flapper". Fitzgerald,

for the most pa~t, bitterly resented the development. After

seeing a number of them in Paris, he wrote: "If l had anything

to do with creating the manners of the contemporary American

girl l certainly made a botch of the job."lD In one of his

notebooks, he said of an unnamed relative that she was still

a flapper in the 193D's. "There is no doubt," he added, "that

she originally patterned herself upon certain immature and

Blbid • , p. 267. 9lbid • , p. 208.

lOIbid. , p. 362.

5.

unfortunate writings, of mine, so that 1 have a special indul--gence for~as for one who ha5 lost an arm or leg in one's

service."ll The imitative process has not been confined

to his own lifetime. In a recent issue of Time magazine

appeared the following description of a young, American star-

lette, Alice McGraw:

The language is that of a Scott Fitzgerald heroine, and rightly so. ~li ••• i5 a. reasonable facsimile of Judy Jones in Winter Dreams, whose mouth gave a 'continuaI im­pression of flux, of intense life, of passionate vitality -balanced only partially by the sad luxury of her eyes.' Even more, she seems to be playing some endless version of Gatsby's Daisy, whose voice had 'a5inging compulsion, a whispered "Listen", a promise that she has done gay, exciting things just a while since and there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour! Fitzgerald - not cOincidentally, one of her favorite authors - surely could have written her biography.12

His portrait of the American girl seems to be as attractive

and as haunting to his readers as to Fitzgerald, himself.

F.itzgerald's preoccupation with the American female

can perhaps b~ best explained by his biography. AlI his life,

Fitzgerald moved in a "world of petticoats". In his home, his

mother was the dominant figure - she possessed the money and

social prestige. His father, although of old Maryland stock,

was financially a failure and continued to recede into the

background, Their first two children, both girls, died shortly

befora Scott was borne "Three months before 1 was born," he

Il as quoted by Malcolm Cowley, "Third Act and Epilogue", f. Scott Fitzgerald, A Collectign of Critical Essays, ed. Arthur Mizener Œnglewood Cli ffs, 1963)., p. 65.

l2~on. "The Girl Who Has Everything - Just About", Time, May 9, 1969, p. 54.

6.

wrote, "my mothar lost her other two children and 1 think

that came first of all though 1 don' t know how i t worked.

exactly. 13 1 think 1 started then to be a writer." Fitzgerald

always claimed that his mother spoiled and "sissified" him -

made him become a writer rather than a football hero. Indead,

if the assessment is correct, F.itzgerald does fit the image

of the "mother's boy". In his critical portrait of Fitzgerald,

Henry Dan ~iper writes of his mother:

As she grew older, she became increasingly eccentric and possessive, and so never really succeededin winning Scott's friendship or respect. She perennially worried that he would succumb to a chronic family weakness toward tuberculosis, a fear that was justified, as things turned out. He was so bundled up in hats, coats, and overshoes that he developed a lifelong hatred of protective clothing of any kind. And, on the pretext of his delicate health, Molly let him stay home from school whenever he felt like it - which was often. She also encouraged his tendency to show off in public. Nothing pleased her better than to have her five-year-old son perform for the neighbors in the front parlor, reciting poems he had memorized or singing popular ballads. 'Godl' he would one day write in the margin of his autobiographical account of his childhood, jabbing his pen angrily through the page at this humiliating memory.l4

As he grew older, Fitzgerald was increasingly embarrassed by

his mother - she dressed oddly and was famous for her faux ~.

There is a good deal of evidence to prove that

Fitzgerald suffered From an abnormal relationship with his

mother. AlI his references to his mother in his letters

exhibit a deep loathing and disgust for her:

13 Imdrew Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, (New York, 1962), p. 7.

14Henry Dan Piper, F. Scott Fitzgerald. A Critical Portrait, (New York, 1965), p. 8.

Why shouldn't l go crazy? My father is a- moron and my mother is a neurotic, half insane with pathological nervous worry. Betwèen them they haven't and never have had the brains of Calvin Coolidge. 15

Isn1t Mother a funny old wraith? Didn't you get a suggestion of the Witches Cave from several of the things that she said at 2400?16

l wasn't fond of my mother who spoiled me. Vou were a great exception among mothers - managing by sorne magic of your own to preserve both your children's love and their respect. Too often one of the two things is sacrificed.17

Mother and l never had anything in common except a relentless stubborn quality •••• 18

Throughout his novels and short stories, the maternaI figure

ispresented as a domineering, ogre-like figure; the state of

motherhood, as something bestial and disgusting; and sex, as

something fearful and guilt-producing, characteristic of the

incest complexe Perhaps the most persuasive evidence of aIl

is the unfinished novel that was to follow Gatsby - a novel

about matricide called ~ Boy ~ Killed His Mother~

"At about this time he also wrote a comic ballad about a dope

fiend of sixteen who murdered his mother. . . . Fitzgerald

used ta deliver this ballad at parties, his face powdered white,

a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and his hands trembling.,,19

Whether or not Fitzgerald really wanted to kill his mother and

15 ~ndrew Turnbull, ed. The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald,

(Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 219.

l612i&., p. 437.

17Ibid ., p. 439.

l8Ibid ., p. 554.

190 • S. Savage, "The Significance of F. Scott Fitzgerald", F. Scott Fitzgerald, A-Collection of Critical Essavs, ed. Arthur Mizener (Englewood Cliffs, 1963), p. 153.

8.

suffered from incestuous regression is dangerous speculation,

but that he did have a conscious and deep-rooted dislike of

her which was ne ver completely resolved is a relatively safe

assumption.

The autobiographical material of Fitzgerald's child-

hood and early adolescence is populated with female figures.

He had a younger sister, whom he later tried to transfdrm into

his image of a popular girl: "Up till now Fitzgerald hadn't

much to do with his sister ••• she was quiet and pretty, and

he was proud of her and anxious that she make the most of he~

possibilities. To this end he wrote her lengthy instructions."20

Regardless of whether Dr not his mother was responsible, there

is no denying that Fitzgerald was preoccupied and fascinated

with the femme fatale. At sleven, he succumbed to the charms

of Kitty Williams:

l don't remember who was first but l know that Earl was second and as l was already quite overcome by her charms l then and there resolved that l would gain first place •••• It was impossible to count the number of times l kissed Kitty that afternoon. At any rate when we went home l had secured the coveted lst place. l held this until dancing school stoppsd in the spring and then relinquished it to Johnny Gowns a rival. On Valentines day that year Kitty received no less than eighty-four valentines. 21

His "thought book" records one such childish romance after

another. Each succeeding belle dame ~ merci is given a

20 Andrew Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, (New York, 1962),

p. 66~ 21

John Kuehl, ed. "Introduction", The Aeprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1909-1917, (Brunswlck, N. J., 1965), p. Il.

9.

detailed description of her appearance and manners. He de-

scribes one such "belle", Violet Stockton, as "very pretty

with dark brown hair and eyes big and soft. She spoke with

a. soft southern accent leaving out the ris. She was a year T

aIder then l but together with most of the other boysAliked

her very much.,,22 One can see in the se youthful sketches the

beginnings of the later, full-sc ale portraits of his novels.

The most important femme fatale of Fitzgerald's later

adolescent years was Ginevra King, "the love of my youth."23

He described his affair with her in a. letter ta his daughter

in 1937: "She was the first girl lever loved and l have

faithfully avoided seeing her up ta this moment ta keep that

illusion perfect, because she ended up by throwing me over

with the most supreme boredom and indifference."24 Fitzgerald's

"Ledger" records his college romance with Ginevra in a series

of short statements who se very casualness lends them poignancy.

When he met her, Ginevra was sixteen, a junior at Westover,

and already popular with the Ivy League boys. Arthur Mizener

has summed up their relationship:

For Ginevra, he became for a time the most important of her many conquests. As she said many years later, " ••• at this time l was definitely out for quantity not quality in beaux, and, although Scott y was top man, l still wasn't

22 Ibid ., p. 11 .• 23 Andrew Turnbull, ed., The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald,

(Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 35. 24 Ibid ., p. 34.

10.

serious enough not to want plenty of other attention!" ••• To the end of his life he kept every letter she ever wrote him (he had them typed up and bound; they run to 227 pages). Born and brought up in the best circumstances in Chicago and Lake Forest, Ginevra moved for him in a golden haze. 25

Rosalind, the climactic girl of This Side of Paradise, was

based on Ginevra King. The duration and depth of Fitzgerald's

feelings toward the girl are shown by a remark from a let ter

of November 9, 1938, to Frances Turnbull: "In This ~ BI

Paradise 1 wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding,

as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile.,,26

As Fitzgerald was recovering from the collapse of

this college love affair, he met and subsequently fell ln love

with lelda Sayre. Barely eighteen, lelda was the daughter of

a prominent judge of Montgomery, Alabama. She was renowned

for her beauty, her daring, and her golden hair, and was

regarded as the "top girl." (Fitzgerald wrote later in his

notebook, "1 didn't have the two top things: great animal

magnetism or money. 1 had the two second things, though:

good looks and intelligence. 50 1 always got the top girl. u27 )

Fitzgerald showed considerable narcissistic tendencie8 in

choosing someone he admired for a similarity with but a superiority

to his own qualities -- the type of person he wanted to emulate.

25~rthur Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise, (Boston, 1951), pp. 48-9.

26 Andrew Turnbull, ed., The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 598.

27F• Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson, (New York, 1956), p. 211.

11.

Andrew Turnbull describes this appeal of two alikes:

There was something enchanted, as if predestined, about the coming together of this pair, whose deep similarity only began with fresh, scrubbed beauty. People remarked that they looked enough alikB to be brother and sister, but how much more they resembled each other beneath the skinl For the first time Fitzgerald had found a girl whose uninhibited love of life rivaled his own and whose daring, originality and repartee would never bore him. With Ginevra, part of the attraction had been the society she came from; with Zelda, it was she alone who made an overwhelming appeal to his imagination. She pleased him in all the surface ways, but she also had depths he fell in love with, without understanding why.28

Fitzgerald fell passionately in love with her, and

she with him, but she refused to marry him immediately:

"leI da was cagBy about throwing in her lot with me before

l was a money-maker. She was young and in a period when

any exploiter or middleman seemed a better risk than a

29 worker in the arts." It was not until the publication of

lb!! Side 2f Paradise was assured that lelda agreed to marry

him.

lelda was of course a very important factor in the

development of the Fitzgerald heroine. In a letter to Edmund

Wilson in 1922 he wrote, "the most enormous influence on

me in the four and a half years since l met her has been the

complete, fine and full~hearted selfishness and childmindedness

of lelda."30 Together with Ginevra, she was a model for the

28Andrew Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald (New York, 1962), p. 87. 29 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson

(New York, 1956), p. 78. 30 Andrew Turnbull, ed. The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald,

(Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 351.

12.

heroine of This Side of Paradise: "I married the Rosalind of

the novel, the southern girl l was so attached to, after a

grand reconciliation. 1I31 Every cri tic has acknowledged the

close resemblance between Zalda Sayre and Gloria Gilbert of

The Beautiful sn& Damned. Zelda, in a review of the novel

for the ~ ~ Tribune, confessed she recognized parts of

her diary and sorne personal letters in the book, "in fact,

Mr. Fitzgerald - l believe that is how he spells his name -

seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home. 1I32

Whether Dr not she is a faithful portrait of actual

persons, the "girl" plays a crucial role in Fitzgerald's early

fiction. Of the fourteen selections included in The Apprentice

Fiction of [. Scott Fitzgerald 1909-17, ten are initiated by or

revolve around the girl. The girls are, for the most part,

adolescent femme fatale figures. In liA Luckless Santa Claus"

and "The Trail of Duke", two Newman stories, the girls set

foolish quests that humiliate the heroes. The femme fatale

appears again in four Princeton pieces published in 1917 by

The Nassau Literary Magazine just after Fitzgerald's break with

Ginevra King. Both Isabelle of -Babe in the Woods" and Helen

of "The Debutante" 'are modelled on Ginevra. Although the men

in these stories are not destroyed, the humiliation is much

deeper than it was in the earlier stories. F.lappers SD& Philoso-

31Ibid ., p. 396. 32----

Charles E. Shain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, (Minneapolis, 1967), p. 31.

13.

phers, a collection of short stories published after the success

of lh!2 Side of Paradise, includes eight stories, only one of

which does not have the girl as the central figure. As the

title suggests, the teenage femme fatale has developed into

the "flapper", the 192o's version of a good-time girl. In fact

only four of the stories have the type-character of the flapper

in the leading role. In two of these, "Bernice Bobs Her Hair"

and "Benediction", the action of the story is seen through

the eyes of the heroine. In two of the remaining stories,

"Head and Shoulders" and "The eut-Glass Bowl~' Fitzgerald gives

us a glimpse of the life of the girl after marriage, a life

that turns out not to be such a good time after all. Readers

of Fitzgerald's second collection of short stories, Tales of

the Jazz Age and other Stories, might weIl ask with Fitzgerald's

daughter "Where, oh where, is this wild and brassy Jazz Age?"33

As she says in her introduction to the collection, "If you

search closely, you may discover two flappers betwesn these

covers: the girl who washes her shoes in gasoline in 'The

Jelly-Bean', and the one who dances on top of the table at

Pulpat's restaurant in '0 Russet WitCh,."34 In the se stories,

the flapper has been superseded by the young married girl but

the girl is still atthe heart of the narrative. The la st four

-3.3Frances Fitzgerald Lanahan, "Introduction", Six Tales

of the Jazz Age and O.ther Stories, (New York, 1966), p. 10 Q

34 Ibid., p. 9.

14.

stories deal with the trials and tribulations of early married.

life and the consequent period of adjustment - the taming,

not of the shrew, but of the flapper. Only one story, "The

Curious Case of Benjamin Button", traces the history of the

girl to that, for Fit}gerald at least, dangerous and disastrous

period of middle age.

In each of Fitzgerald's first two novels, the girl

plays an equally, if-not a more, important part. This Side of

Paradise, a very flawed but nevertheless a very "living" novel,

traces Amory's development from his first childish love affair

with Myra St. Clair ta his last "tragic" college affair with

Rosalind Connage. Although Amory is largely restricted ta male

institutions, the six or seven boy-girl relationships occupy

about half of the novel. The novel is the story of a "romantic

egotist" (the novel's first title) and as such focuses on

its hero, Amory Blaine. The girl, therefore, is important

not so much in herse If as in what she reflects about the hero.

As Kenneth Eble points out in his study of Fitzgerald:

"Amory, the romantic egotist, moves, as he should, through a

hall of mirrors which display the facets of his developing per­

sonality. 'In fact,' Fitzgerald wrote about The Romantic Egotist,

'women and mirrors were preponderent [sic] on aIl the important

pages,.,,35 The "dramatic" and emotional climax of the novel

35 . Kenneth E. Eble, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Twayne's United

States Authors Series, (New Haven, 1963), p. 46.

15.

is Rosalind's refusaI of Amory's marriage proposaI.

In The 8eautiful ~ Damned, his second novel, the

girl plays an even more vital role. Edmund Wilson defined the

essential difference between the two books wh en he said that

Fitzgerald, in his first novel, "supposed that the thing to

do was to discover a meaning in life," while in his second,

he made, "much of the tragedy and what Mencken has called 'the

meaninglessness of life t ."36 At any rate, the hero no longer

dominates the stage. Anthony Patch and his girl, Gloria Gilbert,

have equally important parts. Gloria's is, if anything, a

much more vivid role. The hero is completely inanimate and

colorless until his first confrontation with the girl. Gloria

first appears in the second chapter of the novel and is per-

vasive, if not present, until its completion. When she is

absent, as in their forced separation during the war, she is

replaced by another feminine character.

An Inevitable, if unfortunate, consequence of Fitz-

gerald's early work was his identification with the "type ll

character of the flapper. The early stories and This Si de of

Paradise do, in fact, offer few characters who do not either

fit the stereotype or disclose a variant of it. The heroines

of the short stories and Isabelle and Rosalind of This Side of

Paradise seem to merge into one character - pe~haps because

36Edmund Wilson, "F. Scott Fitz~erald"J F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Arthur Mizener, (Englewood Cliffs, 19635, p. 83.

16.

they were fictional portraits of Ginevra and lelda. We do not

expect too much depth of character in a short story but we do

in a novel. However, since the novel is the story of Amory's

development, the "fIat" female characters can be justified.

Depth in them would only divert attention from the protagoniste

If they lack depth, they compensate for it in vividness and

memorableness. Fitzgerald's flapper is young, blond, popular,

witt y, bored and, above aIl, beautiful. She is "unconventional" -

she smokes, says "damn", is fond of kissing, bobs her hair,

makes witt Y cynical remarks, and generally shocks her eIders.

She 15, however, basically innocent and irresistibly charming •.

As Fitzgerald noted, the flapper was the product of

his "immature and unfortunate writings". In his later work,

The 8eautiful and Damned included, he at least attempted a

deeper, more rounded study. Although Gloria possesses many

of the attributes of the flapper, there 15 a ·gulf of difference

between her and the typical flapper, Muriel Kane. Gloria

expands, improves upon, the flapper and, as Fitzgerald was

50 fond of pointing out, "began it aIl". She is occasionally

individualized - hates laundry, loves gumdrops, toys with

8ilphism, denies jealousy - and is given a hint of third

dimension, yearnings after poetry, philosophy and insight.

Fitzgerald tells us she is intelligent, but we are never

thoroughly convinced. Dorothy, a subservient figure, is also

a distinct and human character. 80th are a long way from sorne

of the pale, sentimental portraits of the Victorian and early

17,

American novels.

Apart from the flapper characteristics, the Fitzgerald

girl does have certain constants and consistencies throughout

her fictional career. She is always "golden", always vaguely

defined, always suggestive of an exclusive, magical, whispered

"tomorrow". This vague, elusive quality is basic to her

integrity as a character. Fitzgerald was a romancer and there­

by avoided the limitations imposed by "credibility". He

was not attempting to create "real people" so much as stylized

figures who expand into psychological archetypes. The sig­

nificance of the Fitzgerald girl exists, not in her literaI

credibility, but in her power of implication and of trans­

cendence. She is both vividly contemporary and latently

mythical.

CHAPTER II

THE AMERICAN DREAM AND THE FAIR HEROINE

The Fitzgerald girl in the early short stories and

in the two seminal novels, This ~ of Paradise and The

8eautiful and Damned, is, initially at least, the embodiment

of the American Dream. Marius 8ewley defines the rather

out-worn phrase, American Dream:

Essentially, the phrase represents the romantic enlargement of the possibilities of life on a level at which the material and the spiritual have become inextricably confused. As such, it led inevitably towards the problem that has always con­fronted American artists dealing with American experience -the problem of determining the hidden boundary in the American vision of life at which the reality ends and the illusion begins. Historically, the American Dream is anti­Calvinistic - in rejecting man's tainted nature it is even anti-Christian. It believes in the goodness of nature and man. It is accordingly a product of the frontier and the west rather than of New England and Puri tan traditions. Youth of the spirit - youth of the body as weIl - is a requirement of its existence; limit and deprivation are its blackest devils.37

37 Marius 8ewley, "Fitzgerald and the Collapse of the

Amer:i.can Dream", The Eccentric Design (New York, 1963), p. 266.

19.

That Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby incorporates the

American Dream is common knowledge, but what few critics, if

any, have noticed ls that the metaphor is already implicit,

if not explicit, in Fitzgerald's early fiction. The girls

in these short stories and novels, like Daisy, in their

shadowy way, come to embody the qua lit y of dream that is both

insistent and elusive. They too become the narrative

correlative for the hero's "insatiable capacity..for ~Ender" -

a capacity that, if it is not as Infinite, is at Ieast as

intense as Gatsby's.The girl, beautiful, wealthy and clean,

represents to her romantic, ambitious lover success, the

American Dream itself. The girl, for the heroes of the short

stoxies and of the two novels, Amory Blaine and Anthony Patch

respectively, is the very incarnation of the American vision

of youth, beauty and wealth. The possession of an image like

the girl is the only thing that the hero can finally conceive

as success and he is meant to be a representative American

male, bD th in the intensity of his desire for success and

in the image with which he equates it.

Replacing Heaven, the girl becomes the material,

secular object of what was originally a spiritual, religious

vision. Fitzgerald was Roman Catholic by birth, but agnostic

by inclination. Urged and inspired by his close friend Sigourney

Fay, however, the adolescent Fitzgerald considered the idea

of entering the priesthood. In IIThe Ordeal," one of his

20.

apprentice fictions, Fitzgerald wrote about a young man on

the verge of taking his first vows to become a Roman Catholic

priest. The youth, during the ceremony, is momentarily

accosted by imaginary worldly temptations. The first and

most,insistent is characteristically represented by the girl:

••• he had done with that part of life - and yet he seemed to see a girl with kind eyes, old in great sorrow, waiting, ever waiting. • •• He saw struggles and wars, banners waving somewhere, voices giving hail to a king - and looking at hi~through it aIl were the sweet sad eyes of the girl who was now a woman. • •• The voices pleaded 'Why?' and the girl's sad eyes gazed at him with infinite longing.

(AF, p.)))

The hero manages to overcome the temptation and complete his

vows but in a later, revised version of the story, entitled

"Benediction", the Roman Catholic faith has lost its grlp.

The hero Is replaced by a heroine who visits her brother,

another priest-to-be, and informs him of her loss of faith:

l don't want to shock Vou, Keith, but l can't tell Vou how - how inconvenient being a Catholic is. It doesn't seem to apply anymore. As far as morals go, sorne of the wildest boys l know are Catholics. And the brightest boys - l mean the ones who think and read a lot, don't seem to believe in much of anything anymore. • •• It seems so - so narrow. Church school~, for instance. There's more freedom about things that Catholic people can't see - like birth control.

(F&P, p.15))

In another early story, "Sentiment and the Use of Rouge",

Fitzgerald explains how the war caused the widespread

religious disillusionment: "Damned muddle - everything a

muddle, everybody offside, and the referee gotten rid of -

everybody trying to say that if the referee were there he'd

have been on their side. He was going to find that old

referee - find him - get hold of him - get a good hold -

2].

F cling to him - cling to him - ask him • " ( A~ , p .159 ).

Fitzgerald, it seems, never found the referee but he did

find the girl. In later stories, such as "The Offshore

Pirate", images normally reserved for religious figures are

centred on the girl:

••• poised for a moment like a crucified figure against the skye (F&P, p.37)

. . • pagan rituals of her soul. (Ibid., p.38)

Her sigh was a benediction - an ecstatic suret y that she was youth and beauty now as much as she would ever know." (Ibid., p.44)

In This Side of Paradise, Amory finds "all Gods "fol'

dead, aIl wars fought, aIl faiths in man shaken ••• " (œp,

p.282) 8etrayed by the spiritual, the men of the 1920's

substitute the material, "destined finally to go out into

the dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new

generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of

poverty and the worship of success" (TSP, p.282). Mon-

seigneur Darcy, modelled on Father Fay, was in love with

Amory's mother but betrayed by her. In consequence, he

turns from woman to religion. Amory does just the reverse.

Brought up a Roman Catholic, he substitutes the girl for

the religion: "There was no God in his heart, he knew; • . . But - Oh, Rosalind ! Rosalind ! • • ." (TSP, p. 282) . Clara,

like the others, becomes the raluctant victim of Amory's

deification: "She seemed suddenly a daughter of light alone.

His entity dropped out of her plane and he longed only to

22 ..

touch her dress with almost the realization that Joseph must

have had of Mary's eternal significance" (TSP, p.145). Iq

/.lmory's mind, Clara. has usurpad the celestial throne of Marv,

the central female figure of the Roman Catholic faith, and

Amory becomes an obsequious subject, an ardent worshipper.

/.lmory's earthly paradise, "a paradise of rose and flame"

(TSP., p.186), is an inverted theological conception; his

American Dream is a profane vision.

The Beautiful and Damned envisions a similarly God­

less world. The novel begins in 1913 "when Anthony Patch was

twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the

Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least,

descended upon him" (BD, p.3). It continues in the same

vein':

This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleesant and very attractive to intelligent men and to aIl women. ln this state he considered that he.would one day accomplish some quite subtle thing that the BIset would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and immort~lity.

\ (BD, p.3)

The contrast between Monseigneur Darcy and Amory Blaine of

This Side of P.aradise is replaced by the contrast between

Anthony Patch and Chevalier D'Keefe, the figment of Anthony's

romantic imagination. The contrast i9 brDI~ht one step further

in The Beautiful and Damned. O.' Keefe, "enormously susceptible

to aIl sorts of conditions of women" (BD, p.89), forsakes the

woman for monastic life only to be brought to death by the

23.

sight of a garter. Anthony, like his fictional predecessor

~ory, does just the reverse. He forsakes his god, irony,

for romance (or the woman) only to return to irony through

insanity. Anthony deifies Gloria, but the Christian metaphor

becomes a pagan one, "she was a sun, radiant, growing,

gathering light and storing it - then after an eternity

pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence,

to that part of him, that cheri shed aIl beauty and aIl

illusion" (BD, p.73). Their world is a world of "private

swimming pools", a world in which "both were walking alone

in a, dispassionate garden with a ghost found in a dream"

(BU, p.137). Anthony's American O.ream not only inverts its

theologicai conception but also denies its Christian origine

The American Dream, in Fitzgerald, is inextricably

linked with the traditional fair heroine. This tradition

flourished in America with Cooper and was subsequently used,

with variations, by Hawthorne, Melville and Henry James.

The Fitzgerald girl closely fits Leslie Fiedler's description

of the Fair Heroine "in his LDve .s!J.f!. Oeath in the American

Novel. Fitzgerald's "golden girl", true to tradition, is

a "Fair Virgin", a "blond Goddess", a "blue-eyed Protestant

virgin", a "glorious phantom at the mouth of the cave", the

"Good, Good Girl", the "Nice American Girl". Uke Henry

James, Fitzgerald augments "the charm of chastity with

the magic of money", The fair mai den is "at once the embodi-

24.

ment of a country which dreams such virgins of milk and snow,

and another example of the type; but she is also the portrait

of the artist who makes such a maiden his Muse."38

The first and most important aspect of the girl's

role as American Dream and fair heroine is her beauty. She

satisfies the aesthetic capacity for wonder. For F.itzgerald,

"beauty" refers to physical appearance - the aesthetic object

is a material one. Like Carlyle, the hero of "The Offshore

~irate", Fitzgerald has a vivid and demanding aesthetic

imagination: "You see this is the kind of beauty l want.

Beauty has got to be astonishing, astounding - it's got to

burst in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a

girl" (FP, p.29). Through the girl F.itzgerald conveys

again and again aIl that is socially and sexually desirable

in youth and beauty. The portrait of Lois in "Benediction"

i5 typical of aIl the short story heroines~

She was nineteen with yellow hair and eyes that people were tactful enough not to calI green. When men of talent saw her in a streetcar they often furtively pro­duced little stub-pencils and baçks of envelopes and tried to sum up that profile on the thing that the eyebrowâ did te her eyes. Later they tore them up with wondering sighs.

(FP, p.143)

Fitzgerald's "golden girl" i5 always beautifuL

and blond - in This Side of Paradise, Myra has "strands of

ye110w hair" (TSP, p.13), Clara, "ripp1y golden hair" (TSP,

38Leslie Fied1er, Love and Daath in the American Novel, (New York, 1966), pp. 291-316.

25.

p.l38), and Rosalind, "glorious yellow hair, the desire to

imitate which supports the dye industry" (T5P, p.121). For

Amory, the American Dream is a "fairyland of piping satyrs

and nymphs with the faces of fair-haired girls he passed in

the streets of Eastchester" (T5P, p.33). True to the tra-

ditional colour scheme of the fair heroine, Fitzgerald's

girl is always pale and white, with blue or grey eyes.

Amory dreams of Montmartre "where Ivory women delved in

romantic mysteries" (TSP, p.32), and realizes his dream in

Rosalind: "There were gray eyes and an unimpeachable skin

with two spots of vanishing color" (TSP, p.172).

In The Beautiful and Oamned, Fitzgerald devotes the

bulk of his lyricism to the description of Gloria's beauty.

Like Gatsby, she is born of "Platonic conception". In a

"d'ramatic" seq~ion entitled "A Flash-Back in Paradise lJ , she

is the personification of Beauty", a phoenix-like figure with

beautiful budy and soul:

Bea ut y, who was born anew every hundred years, sat in a sort of outdoor waiting room through which blew gusts of white wind and occasionally a_breathless hurried star. The stars winked at her intimately as they went by and the winds made a soft incessant flurry in her haire 5he was incomprehensible, for, in her, soul and spirit were one - the beauty of her body was the essence of her soule 5he was that unit y sought for by philosophers through many centuries. In this outdoor waiting room of winds and stars she had been sitting for a hundred years, at peace in contemplation of herself.

(80, p.29)

This rather sophomoric attempt at humor or wit apparently

represents Fitzgeraldls preparation for Glerials overwhelming

26.

beauty. 8eauty is reincarnated in twentieth cent ury America

in the person of Gloria Gilbert.

For Anthuny, Gloria becomes the subject of aesthetic

contemplation:

Anthony, sitting at one end of the sofa, examined her profile against the foreground of the lamp; the exquisite regularity of nose and upper lip, the chin, faintly decided, balanced beautifully on a rather short neck. On a photograph she must have been completely classical, almost cold - but the glow of her hair and cheeks, at once flushed and fragile, made her the most living person he had ever seen.

(80, p.S8)

Gloria is a work of art, and a traditional fair heroine -

a "golden girl" (80, p.133) with "yellow ripples of hair"

(80, p.6l) pale, white skin, "Alice-blue" and white clothes.

Like Hawthornels Phoebe, Glorials beauty has the typically

American attributes of freshness and cleanliness. With

"miraculous freshness" (80, p.210) and "blowy" (80, p.13l)

cleanliness, "starched and fresh as a flower" (80, p.128),

the girl radiates an immaculate, laundered beauty.

Two other important aspects of the girlls role as

American Dream and fair heroine are youth and innocence. In

the American Dream there are only two tenses - present and

future. It is essentially an irresponsible attitude toward

time in that it rejects history and tradition. The attitude

explains the obsessive youth worship of popular American

cu~ture. The female is always a "girl" never a "woman " ,

always a "child" never an "adult". She embodies the vision

of perpetuaI and eternal youth. Like Ar~ita in "The Offshore

27..

Pirate", she is "a high-spirited, precocious child" (FP, p.19);

like Sally CarroI in "The Ice-Palace", she is "a happy lit~le

girl" (EP, p.69); like Roxanne in "The Lees of Happiness",

she is "as young as a spring night and summed up in her own

adolescent laughter" (JA, p.124). Since the stories and

This Side of P.aradise are, for the most part, adolescent

narratives, the image patterns of childhood are understandable.

However, in The Beautiful and Damned, a story of.adult life,

they a~e even more profuse. Gloria, as both her mother and

Maury Noble testify, has a very youthful spirit, "Gloria

has a very young soul - irresponsible, as much as anything

else.She has no sense of responsibility" (BD, p.39). "She

seemed somehow the youngest person there • • • [a] Beautiful

child" (BD, p.48) The word "child" and its variations, in

a series of picturesque images, recurs again and again. "Her

face was as untroubled as a litt le girl's, and the bundle

that she pressed tightly to her bosom was a child's doll, a

profound and infinitely healing balm to her disturbed and

childish heart" (BD, p.6S). Like aIl American girls, she

calls her father "daddy" (BD, p.6S) and uses "the adjective

Ilittle l whenever she asked a favor - it made the favor sound

less arduous" (BD, p.183). Fitzgerald's American female is

more girl than woman, more chi Id than ~irl.

Like time, morality is viewed with a child-like,

irresponsible attitude. Innocence, for Fitzgerald, is the

pristine integrity of the asexual childish selfhood. As the

28.

girls are children, their chief virtue is that most closely

associated with childhood and the state of innocence -

chastity, a virtue which for Fitzgerald means virginity.

Fitzgerald, both in his short stories and in ~ ~ of

Paradise, with his asides on kissing and petting, meant to

shock the reader~

None of the Victorian mothers - and most of the mothers were Victorian - had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed. • •• Amory saw girls doing things that even in his memory would have been impossible: eating three-o'clock, after-dance suppers in impossible cafes, talking of every side of life with an air half of earnestness, ha If of mockery, yet with a furtive excitement that Amory considered stood for a: real moral let-down.

(TSP, p.sa)

Ironically, what strikes the reader today is not the "moral

let-down" but the moral innocence. Fitzgerald's daughter

expressBS this feeling in her introduction to Tales gf ~

Jazz ADe: ----And another thing which may surprise some youthful readers of this collection is the fact that nobody in it kiss8s any­body else unless they're related by marriage or parenthood -and again with the single exception of the gasoline girl, who rewards Jim with a brush of her Irresistible lips for his success at shooting craps. The book is totally devoid of sex as we have come to take it for granted in modern writing. One exasperated wifl~ in "Gretchen's Fort y Winks" appears on the verge of going into New York to the theater with another man, but her husband promptly puts a sleeping powder into her coffee and that disposes of the matter sumlii<:::rily.39

Indeed, when the girl does "kiss" she seems to like it in the

same way she would like a new style of dresse The "kiss"

39 Frances Fitzgerald Lanahan, "Introduction", Six Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories, (New York, 1960), p. 10.

29.

is the climax of a fairy tale in I!:!!::!. Sida of Paradise; liAs

in the story-books, she ran into them, and on that half­

minute, as thair lips first touched, rested the high point

cf vanity, the crest cf his young egotism" (TSP, p.89). Love'

is a - childish game:.. "Children, most astute of match-makers,

plot their campaigns quickly, and Sally had played a clever

correspondence Sonata to lsabelle's excitable temperament ll

(TSP, p.62).

The same aura of innocence surrounds the heroine

of The Beau·ti fuI !ill!. Damned. The images attempt to be more

subtle and sophisticated but are essentially the same. After

Gloria and Anthony's first kiss, the girl is described as a

"swan" , her fece a "white Iake" (BD, p.I02). 5Me becomes the

goddess of chastity: "In a thousand guises Thais would hail

a cab and turn up her face ~or loving. And her pailor would

be virginal and lovely, and her kiss chaste as the moon"

(80, p.I07). With her too, IIkissing ll is merely a game: "My

kisses were because the man was good-Iooking·, Dr because there

was a slick moon, Dr even because live felt vaguely sentimental

and a little stirred. But that's all - it's had utterly no

effect on me" (BD, p.~8Z). 5he flatly refuses ~thony's kiss

"that was neither agame nor a tribute" (BD, p.1141. 5he

tells Anthony that she IImight ll be unfaithful in marriage, but

when she has the chanceshe is disgusted. She keeps her

chastity intact and fulfills Fitzgerald's ~erican Dream of

immaculate womanhood.

30 .•

Fitzg~rald's "golden girl" is not only blond but

wealthy. Money is one of her most potent charms. The close

association between money and the girl probably stemmed from

hie own experience. Of the pUblication of ~ ~ of

Paradiee which provided the money, which in turn brought back

Zelde, Fitzgerald remerked in retroepect~

The man with the jingle of money in hie pockets who married the girl e year leter would always cherish an abiding dis­trust, an animosity towards the leisure class ••• since then l have never been able to stop wondering where my friends' money came from, nor to stop thinking that at one time a sort of droit de seigneur might have been exercised to give one of them my girl.40

Money, as has so often been pointed out, is important in Fitz-

gereld - but its importance lies in its function as a means

not as an end. As the above passage reveals, money is a symbol

of possession. With money, the man can possess t~e girl.

Either the man proves he is a success and wins the girl, or

he proves a failure and loses the girl.

Money, in fact, becomes a magic wand capable of

transforming the 1920's into a Golden Age and the American

girl into a Fairy P.rincess. The addition of money to the girl

turns the story into a fairy tale. Like Henry James,

Fitzgerald deliberately employs many of the elements of the

fairy-tale. The most obvious fairy tale he uses is Cinderella -

but there is a significant change. The hero becomes Cinderella

40D• S. Savage, "The Significance of F. Scott Fitzgerald", F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Arthur Mizener, (Englewood Cliffs, 1963), p. 149.

31 •.

and the heroine is the Golden Prince(ess.). The success stciry

is his, not herse Bank-notes usher in .the bride.

F.itzgerald's girl is an embodiment of the glamor

of weal th. The chief recommendation o,f the heroine of "The

Camel's Back", as it is of many other heroines, is her father's

gold:

l want Vou ta meet his love. Her name is Betty Medill, and she would take weIl in the movies. Her father gives her three hundred a month to dress on, and she has tawny eyes and hair and feather fans of five colors. l shall also introduce her father, Cyrs Medill. Though he is ta aIl appearance flesh and bloon, he is, strange ta say, commonly known in Toledo as the Aluminum Man. But when he sits in his club window with two or three Iron Men, and the White Pine Man, and the Brass Man, they look very much as vou and l do, only more so, if you know what l mean.

(JA, p..35)

The association of gold and the girl evokes the fairy story

in which the Princess spins whole rooms of money from akeins

of wool. In This Side f!.f. P.aradise, the fairy tale is alluded.

to wi th regard to Clara:. "Golden II it!.ê. m, golden notes f.!:f!!!!.

golden mandolins, frets of golden violins, fs!!, Qh. wearilv

fair ••• skeins f!Qm braided basket, mortals mav Ilot ~; oh,

what young extravagant Gad, who would ~ BI ~ it, •••

who could give such gold ••• "<"TSP, p.147). Rosalind, the

most important "golden girl" of the novel, is another Golden

Princesse In a dramatized section of the novel aetually

transformed from an apprentiee play called "The Debutante",

Fitzgerald gives us a detailed inventory of the luxurious ra am

and expensive material possessions of the debutante ta create

this magic of wealth: "One would enjoy seeing the bill called

32.

forth by the finery displsyed and one is posaessed by a des ire

to see the princess for whose benefit - Look! There's sorne

oneL" (TSP, p.16).

Since the glamor of wealth is one of the golden

girl's most attractive attributes, she demands money to

maintain that charm. Frustrated by Zelda's refusal of marriage

on financial grounds, Fitzgerald asked her several times why

"they kept princesses in towers". lalda never answered the

question but Rosalind tells Amory that she rejects his suit

because she realizes that without the glamor of wealth her

attraction would be considerably diminished: "1 can't be

shut away from the trees and flowers, cooped up in a narrow

atmosphere. l'd make Vou hate me" (TSP, p.195). She would

make a poor domestic Cinderella~ "1 don't want to think about

pots and kitchens and brooms. 1 want to worry whether my

legs will get slick and brown when 1 swim in the summer" (TSP,

p .. 196). As she herself confesses: "1 never think about

money" (TSP, p.178), but nevertheless she must have it, oYes,

1 suppose sorne day 1'11 marry a ton of it ••• " (TSP, p.179).

She does capitulate to the most financially successful suitor

and Amory is le ft disillusioned with lia system where the

richest ma~ gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her"

(TSP, p.277).

The same system exists in The Beautiful and Damned

but the hero has the "top thing" and therefore wins the "top

girl". ~nthony Patch is the grandson of Adam Patch, a

33.

multimillionaire, and as such is in a favorable position to

disregard the "system". He too, nevertheless, has his troubles

in winning the Golden Princesse True to the fairy-tale

erchetype, the heroine must be rescued from the unwelcome

embraces of another and older male. "That person Bloeckman",

as he is called, "a stoutening, ruddy Jew of about thirty-

five" (BD, p.43), fulfills the role. Anthony, first realizing

the objective of the middle-aged suitor, "wanted to kill

Bloeckman and make him suffer for his hideous presumption"

(BD, p.118), but later sees it is unnecessary. J;\nthony's

suit is accepted, the rescue is complete.

As in the short stories and This Side of Paradise,

love is a commercial agreement; the "girl" is bought and sold

across the counter, as it were. The Beautiful ~ Damned,

hOWBver, carries the process further. Not only is the girl

"acquired" by financial success, but she must be protected

by continued success. Possession of the girl, like a kind of

stock-dividend, depends on perpetuaI "investment" of financial

and emotional funds. Their mutual dreams of private swimming

pools and private rivers depends upon money: "These times were

to begin 'when we get our money;' it was on such dreams rather

than on any satisfaction with their increasingly irregular, -

increasingly dissipated life that their hope rested" (BD, p.277).

The money, the inherited wealth of Adam Patch, becomes the

buried treasure of the fairy-tale or quest romance and

Anthony's Puritan reforming grandfather becomes the dragon

34.

who guards the hoard. Money, then, is the means not only

of acquiring but of maintaining the girl. Gloria, to sustain

h~r charm and glamor, needs financial investment. The

-Golden Princess turns out to be an expensive proposition.

The Fitzgerald girl is a fair heroine and a Golden

Princess but she is also the "girl next door". As Amory

thinks to himself, his girls were'''all-American'': "Eleanor

would pitch, probably southpaw, Rosalind was out-field,

wonderful hitter, Clara first base, maybe" (TSP, p.259). The

most "American" of aIl their charms is their "popularity".

Popularity, a curious American phenomenon, implies a wide

social acceptance or desirability. For a girl, popularity

means a long list of admirers of the opposite sex. Fitzgerald

describes the "Popular Oaughter" in a characteristic sophomoric

satire in This Si de QI paradise:

• • • the P.opular Oaughter becomes engaged every six mon"ths between sixteen and twenty-two, when she arranges a match with young Hambell, of Campbell and Hambell, who fatuously considers himself her first love, and between engagements the P.O. (jhe is selected by the cut-in system at dances, which favors the survival.of the fittest) has other senti­mental last kisses in the moonlight, or the firelight, or the outer darkness ••••

The "belle" had becom~ the "flirt", the flirt had become the "baby vamp". The "belle" had five or six calIers every afternoon. If the P.D., by sorne strange accident, has two, it is made pretty uncomfortable for the one who hasn't a date with her. The "belle" was surrounded by a dozen men in the intermission between dances. Try to find the P.O. between dances, just try to find her.

(TSP, p.58-59)

That this satire was o~ly half-hearted is indicated by the fact

that Fitzgerald wrote lengthy instructions to his sister on how

to become a popular girl. Included among the instructions are

35.

the general subjects of conversation, poise, carriage, dancing,

expression, dress and personality. It shows amazing insight

for a boy of nineteen. He sums up the last qualifications,

"the person you're with, man, boy, woman, whether it's Aunt

Millie or Jack Allen or myself likes to feel that the person

they're sponsoring is at least externally a credit".4l

Popularity or social acclaim is a very important.~nd attractive

attribute to the conforming, insecure American male.

Fitzgerald's instructions to his sister, like 50 much

of his personal experience, was of service to him. As he later

inserted in the margin of the letter, the lesson was the "basis

of Bernice". "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" tells the story of how a

shy, withdrawn girl is transformed by her more vivacious cousin

into the image of a popular girl. Bernice must emulate her

cousin and follow her instructions on dress, personality and

conversation. 5he succeeds so weIl that Bernice wins her

cousi~'è best besux. Out of spite, her cousin dares her to

follow up her line of "bobbing" her haire 5he takes the dare

and, "This was the test supreme of her sportsmanship, her

right to walk unchallenged in the starry heaven of popular

girls" (FP, p.13S). 50 that the last laugh will be on her

cousin, Bernice "bobs" her cousin's hair while she is asleep

and throws the hair on the boyfriend's porch. This act of

daring completes her transformation.

41F.. Scott Fitzgerald, ~T~h=e~A~~~~~~~~~~~~5=c~ot~t~ Fitzgerald, 1909-1917, ed. John N.J., 1965), p. 131.

36.

Fitz~erald and his heroes continued to be infatuated

with the popular girl. For Amory of This Side of Paradise,

the girl's popularity assures him of her romantic notice. The

more popular sheis, the more desirable she becomes. Isabelle,

who appeare both in an apprentice piece called "Babes in the

Woods" and in This Side Ef Paradise, is a typical exemple of

the "P.O."

Her education or, rather, her sophistication had been absorbed from the boys who had dangled on her favori her tact was instinctive, and her capacity for love-affaire was limited only by the number of the susceptible within telephone distance. Flirt smiled from her large black-brown eyes and shone through her intense physical magnetism.

(TSP, p.63)

The American male seems afraid to rely on his own judgement;

the girl's value must be acknowledged by the common denominator.

Amory "loved to do any sort of thing with Claral Shopping

with her was a rare, epicurean dream", not because he enjoyed

her company but because: "In every store where she had ever

traded she was whispered about as the beautiful Mrs. Page"

(TSP, p.143). The sense of competition provides much of the

ettraction of romance. Amory is elated when Myra confesses

that she likes him the "first twenty-five and Froggy Parker

twenty-sixth" (TSP, p.l4). Amory is similarly elated when

Rosalind chooses him from a host of eligible suitors.

Gloria Gilbert of The Beautiful and Damned is another

example of the Popular Daughter. Nicknamed "Coast to Coast

Gloria", she is thus described by h~r mother: "Gloria goes,

goes, goes. 1 tell her 1 don't see how she stands it. She

37.

dances aIl afternoon and aIl night, until l think she's going

to wear herself to a shadow" (BD, p.39). Gloria's social

promiscuity is described in terms more of recommendation than

of blame: "And then euer since she was twelue years old she's

had boys about her so thick - oh, so thick one couldn't ~.

At sixteen she began going to dances àt preparatory schools,

and then came the colleges; and euerywhere she went, boys,

boys, boys."(BD, p.79). To the girl herself, popularity is

a source of endless delight and power, "she had fed on it

ruthlessly - enjoying the crowds around her, the manner in

which the most desirable men singled her out; enjoying the

·fierce jealousy of other girls" (BD, p.81). That Gloria has

been tos6ed about as a social football does not seem to

bother Anthony; indeed, he is proud that she is one of the

most sought-after and celebrated young girls of the country.

Popularity spells success, and success i5 what the American

Oream is aIl about.

CHAPTER III

THE AMERICAN NIGHTMARE AND THE DARK HEROINE

Fitzgerald was a chronicler of the American Dream,

but he was also a cri tic of it. For as powerful and perva-

sive as the American Dream ls in his work, it is only tran-

sient. The images that reinforce it - flowers, moths, ghosts,

glass, wind and leaves - are as fragile and delicate as the

American Dream itself. "The Off-Shore Pirate", perhaps the

most dream-like and paradisial of aIl his work, possesses

these images in rich profusion~

They float out like dri~ting moths under the rich hazy light, and as the fantastic symphony wept and exulted and wavered and despaired, Ardita's last sense of reality dropped away, and she abandoned her imagination to the dreamy summer scents of tropical flowers and the Infinite starry spaces overhead, feeling that if she opened her eyes it would be to find herse If dancing with a ghost in a land created by her own fancy.

(FP, p.41)

Even here, however, Fitzgerald is aware that the American

Dream deals in perishable goods: "The dew rose and turned to

a golden mist, thin as a dream, enveloping them until they

39.

ssemed gossamer relics of the late night, infinitely .transient

and already fading." (FP, p.41) Although these 5ame image

pstterns give unit y to aIl his work, the controlling symbolism

of his vision is lunar. The moon is present at every love

affaire It is en appropriate image since it simultaneously

suggests romance and chastity and also the changeability and

mortality of woman.

Fitzgereld's romantic imagination is not one-sidedj

he was endowed with a double vision. 8ehind or beside the

American Dream lies the American nightmare:

AlI the stories that came into my head had a touch of disaster in them - the lovely young creatures in my novels went to ruin, the diamond mountains of my stories blew up, my millionaires were es beautiful and damned as Thomas Hardy's peasants. In life these things hadn!t happened yet, but 1 was pretty sure living wasn1t ~~e reckless, careless business these people thought.

E-laborating on this "touch of disaster", Fitzgerald wrote

in the account of his crack up, "the test of a first-rate

intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in

the mind at the same time, and still retain the ebillty to

function. ,,43 In the b~st. of his ~ork, Fi t~gerald possesses

this ironic intelligence. Like the narrator in The Great

Gatsby, Fitzgerald was "within and without, simultaneously

enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."

This double vision is present even in his early short stories

42F• Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack Up, (New York, 1956), p. 87.

43Ibid ., p. 69.

40..

and hls flrst two novel~. We may feel that the affirmation

ls stronger than the denial, but closer analysis reveals a

balance, if a dangerously precarious one. We are still this

side of paradise; even.the beautiful face damnation.

Like the American Dream, the American nightmare

clusters around the female figure. Enchantment and adoration

of the girl changes to terror and disgust. In "The Drdeal",

an apprentice story, the young prie~t-to-be Is about to succumb

to the charm of the Feminine image when suddenly " •••

something snapped. They were still there, but the girl's eyes

were aIl wrong, the lines around her mouth were cold and

chiselled and her passion seemed dead and earthy" (AF, p.84).

Dften the sense of horror, the repulsion, and the despair

focuses on the Feminine sex as a whole. The sense of hope-

lessness, futility and betrayal Amory experiences at the end

of This Side of Paradise he attributes to the female sex: --- ~

Women - of whom he had expected so muchj whose beauty he had hoped to transmute into modes of art; whose unfathomable instincts, marvellously Incoherent and inarticulate, he had thought to perpetuate in terms of experlence - had become merely consecrations to their own posterity. Isabelle, Clara, Rosalind, Eleanor, were aIl removed by their very beauty, around which men had swarmed, from the possibility of contributing anything but a sick heart and a page of puzzled words to write.

(TSP, p.263)

In The Beautiful ~ Damned, the disillusion ·becomes

bitter cynicism. In it, Fitzgerald occasionally betrays a

somewhat unconscious disllke of the whole female species:

"females, in the word's most contemptuous sense, breeders

and bearers, exuding still that faintly odorous atmosphere of

41.

the cave and the nursery~ (BD, p.104). The noise of woman's

laughter evokes a Gothic vision of the horror of life:

Try as he might to strangle his reaction, some animal quality in that unrestrained laughter hed g~sped at his imagination, and for the first time in four months aroused his old aversion and horror toward aIl the business of life. The room had grown smothery. He wanted to be out in some cool and bitter breeze, miles above the cities, and live sere ne and detached back in the corners of his mind. Life was that sound out there, that ghastly reiterated female sound.

(BD, .p.150)

Fate, the strongest barrier to the realization of the American

Oream, is disguised as the Eternal Feminine. The female

paradoxically becomes the embodiment of the American reality

which, for Fitzgerald, is the American nightmare.

The American nightmare is more Dften crystallized

by a single female figure. The figure becomes the dark com-

plement to the Fair Heroine and again closely resembles

Leslie Fiedler's description of the dark heroine in Love

-and Oeath in the American Novel. Fitzgerald's dark heroine,

true to tradition, is the IIsinister embodiment of the sexuality

denied the snow maiden ll , a "bearer of poison ll , "the Romantic's

concept of Belle dame sans merci reinforced by the resurgence

out of the Christian past of the arche types of Lilith and Eve

who brought sin into the world".44 Oangerous and wor~dly, she

traditionally possesses thick dark hair and dark eyes and has

behind her ~ll the primitive terror of darkness and blackness.

44Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the AmericBn Novel, (New York, 1966), p. 296.

42.

She cames ta symbolize the triple threat of sex, sin and death

and represents the world not of heaven but of hell. The rela-

tionship is a demonic, erotic one - passion becomes fierce and

destructive. The dark heroine is a harlot, witch, siren or

other luring female, an abject of desire - n ••• the man faels

horror for the woman and at the same time an attraction which

45 is part of his sense of horror." 5he is sought as a

possession but can never be possessed.

Sometimes the dark heroine 15 merely a prostitute.

There are two such women in ~ Si de of Paradise. Axia

Marlowe, the first one, 15 Amory's date for a night in New

York. They, together with a college friend and his oate,

Phoebe go out "on the town" and finally retire ta the girls' J

apartment. At the point of erotic communication with the dark

girl, Amory envisions Satan:

There was a minute while temptation crept over him like a warm wlnd, and his imagination turned ta fire, and he took the glass from Phoebe's hand. That was aIl; for at the second K that his deèision came, he looked up and saw, ten yards from him, the man who had been in the cafe, and with his jump of astonlshment the glass fell from his uplifted hand. There the man half sat, half leaned against a pile of pillows on the corner divan. His face was cast in the same yellow wax as in the cafe, neither the dull pasty color of a dead man - rather a sort of vile pallor - not unhealthy, you'd have called it; but like a strong man who'd worked in a mine or done night shifts in a damp climate.

(TSP, p.l)))

The Satanic vision overwhelms him, and he flees in a fit of

45 i Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, (London, 1951), p. 268.

43.

terror. "Axia's sidelong, suggestive smile" (TSP, p.117)

continues to haunt him. He doesn't admit it to himself but

the dark girl, the embodiment of sex, becomes the embodiment

of evil and of horror.

The encounter with the second promiscuous dark lady

produces the same vision of horror. Alec Connage, Rosalind's

brother and Amory's Princeton friend, brings Jill, a morally

lax girl, to his hotel room. Amory co vers for Alec with the

house detectives. The same pervasive sense of evil overcomes

him:

• • • Over and around the figure crouched on the bed there hung an 'aura, gossamer as a moonbeam, tainted as stale, weak wine, yet a horror, diffusely brooding already over the three of them. • • and over by the window among the stirring curtains stood something else, featureless and indistinguishable, yet strangely familiar •••

(TSP, p.247)

It is not until later in the novel that Amory is able to

analyse the two experiences:

Once he had been miraculously able to sc'ent evil as a horse detects a broken bridge at night, but the man with the queer, feet in Phoebe's room had diminished to the aura over Jill. His instinct perceived the fetidness of poverty, but no longer ferreted out the deeper evils in pride and sen5uality.

(TSP, p.2(2)

Sex and evil have come to form a neat equation in his mind.

Fitzgerald's dark heroine is not always so crude

and simple as these two harlots. Nancy Lamer, the central

female figure of IIJelly Sean", is distinctly not a harlot.

She possesses, however, aIl the attributes of the conventional

dark lady. She i5 an American girl but of Foreign extraction;

44.

"Nancyhad a mouth like a remembered kiss and shadowy eyes

and blue-black hair inherited from.her mother who had been

born in Budapest" (JA, p.20). She has a wild, passionate

nature and a circumspect morality:

She's a wild baby ••• but l like her. So do es everybody. But she does do crazy stunts. She usually gets ,out alive but she's got sc ars aIl over her reputation from one thing or another she's done - Oh she's a wild one. Shoots craps, say, boy! And she do like her high-balls.

(JA, p.23)

Her idol is appropriately Lady Diana Manners, whom she attempts

to emulate: ~Well, she's what l'd like to be. Dark, you

know like me, and wild as sin. She's the girl who rode her

horse up the steps of some cathedral or something and aIl

the novelists made their heroines do it afterwards". (JA, p.26)

Nancy does not ride a horse up the steps of a cathedral but

shedoes do something comp~rable, if not worse. It is in-

directly related how~in an inebriated state, she decides to

shock tne town and marry her contemporary boyfriend during

one of her wild nocturnal adventures. The spark of ambition

that she ignited in Jelly Bean, an enchanted observer, is

extinguished by the act.

The hero, however, is not always an untouched on-

looker. Amory, of This Side of Paradise, actually becomes

involved with a dark heroine. Eleanor, the girl he meets

six months after the break with Rosalind, is a more sophisticated

and complex rendering than either of the two harlots or Nancy

45.

Lamar but she still is a variation on the same theme. 5he

evokes for Amory the "Dark Lsdy of the Sonnets" CTSP, p. 236) ,

has "dark, damp bobbed hair" (TSP, p.225), is "more European

than American •••• 5he had been born and brought up in

France" (TSP, p.223) and ls appropriately called Eleanor

Savage. Like Hawthorne's Zenobia, her American predecessor,

she ls identified wlth wild nature. Amory first discovers

her in a haystack, and "often she sat ln the grass" (TSP, p.

231). They swim and go for moonlight rides in the woods.

Theirs is a country affaire For the aver-urban Fitzgerald,

the country "and nature taka on exotic and~strangely anough~

sinister implications. Like Nancy, Eleanor's associations

are with other rebellious and avil characters. She ls a:

"little devil" (TSP, p.235), "a witch" (T5P~ p.22?), and also

a siren, luring Amory by her enchanting voice: "a weird chant

that started and hung and fell and blended with the rain"

(TSP, p.224). On the final night, she threatens suicide and

in that way embodies the death-wish of Amory. 5he is very

much a femme fatale.

Eleanor is strongly linked with the romantic tra­

dition of the Gothic horror story. Her presence is foreshadowed

by a violent storm and Amo~y find~ himself imprisoned in a

Gothic labyrinth: "He stumbled blindly on, hunting for a,

way out, and finally, through webs of twisted branches,

caught sight of a rift in the trees where the unbroken light­

ning showed open country." (TSP, p.224) The ghost is a re-

46.

current 1mage associated w1th her. She becomes Amory's

alter ego - that sida of him that longs for evil, horror and

death:

W1th her his imagination ran riot and that is why they rode to the highest hill and watched an evil moon ride high, for they knew then that they could see the devil in each other. But Eleanor - did Amory dream her? Afterwards their ghosts played, yet both of them hoped From their souls never to meet.

(TSP, p.233)

As bright and attrective as Eleanor is, Amory is

very much efraid of her "half-sensual, half-neurotic quality"

(TSP, p.233). As with Isabelle, the affair remains pre-

dominently a verbal one and Amory succeeds in rationalizing

himself Dut of love: "Vet was Arnory capable of love now? He

could, as always, run through the emotions in a half hour,

but even while they revelled in their imaginations, he knew

that neither of them could care as he had cared once before."

(TSP, p.23l) Eleanor's problem is that she 15 a real human

being with real sensuality and real spiritual substance.

Eleanor, like the other dark heroines, ends as the embodiment

of evil: "Eleanor was, say, the last time that evil crept

close to Amory under the mask of beauty, the last weird

mystery that held him with wild fascination and pounded his

soul to flakes." (TSP, p.222)

The Beautiful and Damned has another variant of the

dark heroine but the relationship changes From involvement

to entanglement. 5he too ls the embodiment of sex, which for

Fitzgerald seems to mean sin. Anthony Patch meets his dark

47.

lady, Oorothy Raycroft, while he is separated from his wife

in the southern army camp. One of the "vividly dressed, over-

painted girls" (80, p.321) who people the sidewalks, she la

very much a part of "the slow, erotic breath of the South,

imminent in the hot softness of the air, in the pervasive lull

of thought and time" (80, p.321). She is dark and exotic not

because she ls European, but because she is a swarthy, lower

class southerner - just as evil to the New England Puri tan

conscience:

It was an advantage that her accent was different. He could not have determined the social status of a; southerner from her talk - in New York a girl of a lower class would have been raucous, unendurable - except through the rosy spectacles of intoxication •••• Oark was creeping down.

(80, p.323)

Her coloring and dress suggest the sensual and the exatic:

"her black hair in disarray" (BD, p.334), her lilac dress,

and "Her eyes were soft as shadows. Were they violet, or

was it their blue darkness mingling with the gray hues of

dusk?" (BD, p.322). Dot is a "temptress" (80, p.325); she

tempts him to betray his wife. Anthony has an affair with

this "dark,unenduring little flower."

Oorothy is distinctly not a Nice American Girl. In

her town, she enjoys a "rather unsavory reputation" (80, P .326).

No longer retaining her "technical purity", she permits Anthony

to become her fourth "lover " • Anthony is both attracted and

repulsed by her sensuality. He comes to see her whenever he

can but not without severe pangs of conscience. Their habituaI

48.

dating gets him into trouble with the army officials. One

night, like Eleanor, sha thraatens suicide and thereby becomes

the embodiment of the death-wish. She causes Anthony two weeks

of confinement and consequent mental instability. Her image,

if not person, haunts him to the end. He returns to New

York, rejoins his wife and awaits the outcome of the lawsuit

contesting his grandfather's will that has disinherited him.

If the case is successful, they will have more than enough

money to make their dreams realizable and live happily ever

after. Dorothy, however, follows Anthony to New York and ap-

pears in his apartment just befor~ the announcement of the

co urt deci sion :.

He retreated before her into the living room, comprehending cnly a word here and thera in the slow flood of sentences that poured from her steadily, one after the other, in a persistent monotone. She was decently and shabbily dressed -a somehow pitiable litt le hat adorned with pink and blua flowers covered and hid her dark hair.

(BD, p.444)

Her flowered hat 15 a modern version of the flower in Zenobia's

hair, symbol of nature and passion. Her visit provokes in

Anthony "a sort of stupefied horror" (BD, p.44S). Since she

embodies the death-wish for him, he threatens to kill her.

He resorts to violent and destructive action - "then a thick,

Impenetrable darkness came down upon .him and blotted out

thought, rage, and madness together - with almost a tangible

snapping sound the face of the world changed before his

eyes ••• " (BD, p.446).

49.

Sorne of Fitzgerald's heroines are schizophrenic

characters. Nicole Diver of Tender !! ~ Night, his fourth

novel, is a schizophrenic in the layman's sense of the ter~.

She is a double, divided personali ty, fluctuati.ng between

fair and dark heroine. The heroines of the earlier novels

and sorne of the early short staries are double personalities

too, but their doubleness lies not 50 much in their own

mental state as in that of the hero. In the mind of the

hero, the girl experiences a transformation from Fair Maiden

into Dark lady. Once sexually posSBssed, Thais becomes

Circe; the fairy tale becomes a horror story; and the American

Dream becomes the American nightmare. The hero, especially

after marriage, finds not the milk-white maiden he envisaged

but a corrupt and destructive witch.

Sex, then, is the pivot on which the transformation

from fair ta dark heroine occurs. It becomes inextricably

linked with evil, death .and beauty. In the early short staries,

"the problem of sex" appears either as the criminal act of

"Tarquin of Cheapside", in which Fitzgerald tells how Shakespeare

wrote "The Rape of Lucrece", or as the adolescent and frust­

rating game of "Babes in the Woods". In another early story

"Sentiment and the Use of Rouge", sex causes the hero ta

question the old truths. Coming back from the war the he ra

expects to find the fair heroines as he left them: "But there

was something in the very faces of these girls, something

which was half enthusiasm and half recklessness that depressed

50.

him more than any concrete thing" (AF, p.146). Confronted

with the sexual revolution attendant upon the war, the hero

experiences nothing but loathing and disgust for the "new"

girl. One of them attempts to explain the new morality to

him: "It's this - self sacrifice with a capital 'SI. Young

men going to get killed for us. - We could have been their

wives - we can't - therefore weIll be as much as we cano

And that's the story." (AF, p.154) The girl remains for

the hero the extreme opposite, a dark lady: "Eleanorls voice

came to him like the grey creed of a new materialistic world,

the contrast was the more vivid because of the remains of

erotic honor and sentimental religiosity that she flung out

with the rest." (AF, p.154)

In This Side of P.aradise, the hero reacts with

horror and revulsion to any form of sex. Amory's first

sexual encounter exhibits this repugnance of sex and the

sudden transformation of the girl. Myra St. Clair is a young

and lovely golden girl until their relationship reaches the

climax of the kiss: "He had never kissed a girl before, and

he tasted his lips curiously, as if he had munched some new

fruit" (TSP, p.14). The Adamic allusion is obvious; paradise

is lost.

Suddenly revulsion seized Amory, disgust, loathing for the whole incident. He desired frantically to be away, never to see Myra again, never to kiss anyone; he became conscious of his face and hers, of their clinging hands, and he wanted to creep out of his body and hide somewhere safe Dut of sight, up in the corner of his mind.

(TSP, p.14)

51.

Myra loses her ethereal mystique and becomes "a new énimal

of whose presence he had not heretofore been aware" (TS~, p.13).

The same abrupt transition From Fair to dark heroine occurs

with Isabelle. She reaches.the heights of her career as a

golden princess: "It was Isabelle, and from the tep of her

shining hair to her little golden slippers she had never seemed

so beautiful" (TSP, p.89). They kiss and the snow maidSn

turns to ice: "the sparkle in her eye was like lce" (TSP,

p.9l). They argue and the revulsion turns to dislike: "He

became aware that he had not an ounce of real affection for

Isabelle, but her coldness piqued him" (TSP, p.29). The

first kiss is the last; consummation is avoided: "Amory

watched the night that should have been the consummation of

romance glide by with great moths overhead and the heavy

fragrance of roadside gardens, those little sighs. " • •

(TSP, p.92). The dominant feeling is always of sexual desire

and frustration; the kiss or embrace remains unexpressed.

The confusion of beauty and sex with evil becomes explicit

at the end of the novel:

The problem of evil had solidified for Amory into the problem of sex. He was beginning to identify evil with the strong phallic worship in Brooke and the early Wells. Inseparably linked with evil was beauty - beauty, still a constant rising tumult; soft in Eleanor's voice, in an old song at night, rioting deliriously through life like super­imposed waterfalls, half rhythm, ha If darkness. Amory knew that every time he had reached toward it longingly it had leered out at him with the grotesque face of evil. Beauty of great art, beauty of aIl joy, most of aIl beauty of women.

(TSP, p.280)

52.

In ~ ~ of Paradise the hero loses the girl,

whereas in The Beautiful and Damned he marries her. In it,

marriage replaces sex as the pivotaI situation. What strikes

one about this novel is not sex but the lack of lt. The only

allusion to sexual communication is Anthony and Glorials first

kiss, and the response to it "was neither mental nor physical,

nor merely a mixture of the two" (BD, p.104). The identifica-

tion of sex and reproduction with evil and horror is mutual

and for the most part unexpressed. There ls a pervasive sense

of sterility about their marriage. Even before their marriage,

Gloria expresses her repugnance of children and the reprOductive

state: "What a fate - to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my

self-love, to think in terms of milk, oatmeal, nurse, diapers"

(BD, p.147). There is a point when she believes she is preg-

nant. The idea repulses her, "And this body of mine- of

yours - to have it grow ugly and shapeless? It's simply

intolerable" (BD, p.203). When they discover her fears to

be unfounded, they "rejoiced happily" (BD, p.209). Gloria

equates fertility with the common and the animal:

She knew that in her breast she had never wanted children. The reality, the earthiness, the Intolerable sentiment of childbearing, the menace to her beauty - had appalled her. She wanted to exist only as a conscious flower, prolonging and preserving itself. Her sentimentality could cling fiercely to her own illusions, but her ironie soul whispered that motherhood was also the privilege of the female baboon.

(BD, p.393)

It ls the girl that clings to her ethereal mystique and rejects

her earthlness. Gloria, even more than Anthony, wants to remain

53.

the Fair Maiden. Her efforts, however, are fruitless.

Despite efforts on both their parts, m~rriage succeeds

in transforming the virginal mai den into an evil witch, the

fairy tale into a horror story. The transformation begins

when the honeymoon ends: "The breathless idyll 1eft them,

fled on to other lovers; they looked around one day and it

was gone, how thay scarcely knew" (80, p.156). The. fair

mai den is revaaled to have human and unattractive traits:

"Anthony found that he was living with a girl of tramendous

nervous tension and of the most highhanded selfishness" (80,

p.157). He discovers he~ overly-fastidious eating.habits,

her hatred of laundry, and her financial extravagance.

Instead of adjusting themselves to each other, they seem to

be swept to greater and greater dissension. The real

horror story begins when they unwittingly lease the gray

house for another summer:

For the summer, for eternity, they had built themselves a prison. • •• There was a horror in the house that summer. It came with them and settled itself over th~ place like a sombre paIl, pervasive through the lower rooms, gradually spreading and climbing up the narrow stairs until it oppressed their very sleep.

(80, p.234)

Failing to find more enduring resources in themselves, they

come to rely more and more on others' company. Solitude be-

cornes frightful ahd oppressive: "Anthony and Gloria grew to

ha te being there alone •••• More from fear of solitude than

from any Desire to go through the fuss and bother of entertaining,

o

54.

they filled the house with guests every weekend, and often

through the week."(BD, p.235) Their internaI spiritual

degeneration is represented in the wild parties, the furious

drinking and extravagant spending. The horror story reaches

a climax with Glorie's living nightmare durin~ one of these

parties. Developing a Gothie claustrophobia, she flees in

terror from the "evil house and the sombre darkness that was

growing up about it" (BD, p.244). The reversaI is complete;

the dream has become more terrible and sordid than reality

itself.

The- problem with making the girl the embodiment of

the American Dream soon becomes apparent. The girl ls ~

materièl object and, unl~ke the dream, is exhaustible. The

things which she represents - youth and beauty - are transient.

With their fading thera follows tha transformation from fair to

dark heroine. Often the transformation accompanies an actual

change in hair color. In ~ Side of Paradise, Clara bacomes

a datk h~rolne wh en Amory thinks of marriage: "Once he

dreamt that it had come true and woke up in a co Id panic, for

in his dream she had been a silly, flaxen Clara, with the

gold gone out of her hair and platitudes falling insipidly

from her changeling tongue" (TSP, p.141). Rosalind's trans­

formation occurs before our eyes - her youth and beauty begin

to vanish before she has finally and formally rejected Amory:

"She has changed perceptibly - sha is a tri fIe thinner for

one thing; the light in her eyes is not 50 bright, she looks

55.

essily a year older ll (T5P, p.190). Once Rosalind's msrriege

is announced, she ceases to be an object of desire and a fair

msiden for Amory. With her charms of innocente, youth and

beauty gone, shs becomes s dark, unattractive lady:

Never again could he find even the sombre luxury of wanting her - not this Rosalind, harder, older - nor any beaten, broken woman that his imagination brought to the door of his forties - Amory had wanted her youth, the fresh . radiance of her mind and body, the stuff that she was selling now once and for aIl. 50 far as he was concerned, young Rosalind was dead.

(TS~, p.253)

Amory wants a: young and beautiful fair maiden or no girl at

aIl.

In ~ Beautiful ~ Damned, Gloria, very much a

feminine F. Scott Fitzgerald, is poignantly aware of the

transiency of her youth and be8uty. Their eventual 10ss al-

ready begins to haunt her in the gray house in the form of

an imaginary voice~ "Ah, my beautiful young lady, yours is

not the first daintiness and delicacy that has faded here under

the summer sun ••• youth has come into this room in palest

blue and le ft it in the gray cerements of despair •••• (BD,

p.234).

It is this haunting voice that incites her nightmare

vision. She continually longs to recapture her fading youth

and beauty. The realization that she is almost twenty-nine is

a traumatic experience, "making her wonder, through thesa

nebulous half-fevered ho urs whether after aIl she had not

wasted her faintly tired beauty, whether there was such a

thing as use for any quality bounded by a harsh and Inevitable

56.

mortality" (80, p.3911. Out of desperation, she decides to

use and preserve her beauty through motion pictures: "It

cheered her that iri some manner the illusion of beauty could

be sustained, or preserved perhaps in celluloid after the

reality vanished" (80, p.393). When she fails the screen

test, she discovers in horror that her youth and beauty are

perceptibly slipping away from her: "Oh, I,don't want to

live without my pretty facel" (80, p.404) Hoping against

hope to preserve herself she becomes in the end a figure of

pathos: "Each night when she prepared for bed she smeared her

face with soma new unguent which she illogically hoped would

give back the glow and freshness to her vanishing beauty"

(80, p.416). Gloria literally, as weIl as metaphorically~

becomes a dark heroine. The inner deterioration is mirrored

from the outside - her hair begins "darkening slowly ~rom

corn color to a deep russet gold" (80, p.297). "It had changed

in the last year from a rich gold dusted with red to an un­

resplendent light brown. She had bought sorne shampoo soap

and meant to wash it now; she had considered putting a bottle

of peroxide into the rinsing water." (BD, p.425) Her dresses

change from white and blue to black and brown. The final

irony comes when two spectators observe: "She seems sort

of - sort of dyed and unclean, if Vou know what 1 mean" (BD,

p.448). Gloria, who so prized her natural golden, antiseptic

beautyl Despite aIl her efforts, Gloria ends as a dark lady.

57.

The heroines of the two novels are still comparatively

young and beautiful st the time of their transformation. How-

ever, when the heroines reach middle age or older, as they

often do in Teles cf the Jazz Aga, the loathing and revulsion

is doubled. Again and again in this later collection, the

theme of middle age appears. Indeed,' it recur~ with such

predictable frequency that one suspects Fitzgerald of an

obsessive compulsion. The following desc~iption is typical

of Fitzgeraid's fair maid~n-turned-dark heroine during middle

age:

At that time Hildegarde was a woman of thirty-five, with a son, Roscoe, fourteen years old. In the early days of their marriage Benjamin had worshipped her. But, as the years passed, her honey-coloured hair became an unexciting brown, the blue enamel of her eyes assumed the aspect of cheap crockery - moreover, and most of aIl, she had become too settled in her ways, too placid, too content, too anemic in her excitements, and too sober in her taste. As a bride it had been she who had "dragged" Benjamin to dances and dinners - now conditions were reversed. She went out socially with him, but without enthusiasm, devoured already BY that eternal inertia which cornes ~ live with each of ~ .Q!!.§!, BIDL and stays with ..!d.ê. to the ~.

(JA, p.75)

In her introduction to Tales of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald's

daughter, who was middle-aged herself at the time, admitted

that she had a prejudice against the book since "it implies

in no uncertain terms that people of my own general aga are

very old indeed.,,46 One may weIl wonder with her:

46Frances Fitzgerald Lanahan, "Introduction", Six Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories, (New York, 1966), p. 10.

• • • why a well-organized group of his readers didn't have my father tarred and feathered forhis b1atant im­pertinence. But perhaps this is the one detectib1e Jazz Age note after a11: you had to be young, apparent1y, during the Jazz Age, or life might as we1l not have been gone on with at a11. 47 .

58 •

Vouth, beauty and innocence are the imperatives of Fitzgerald's

hopeful vision; when they fade, so vanishes the American Dream.

47Ibid ., p. 11.

CHAPTER IV

RD LE REVERSAL

As Fitzgerald hinted, the dominant and most re­

vealing symbol of the male-female relationship he records

is the symbol of the mirror. The mirror ls, in fact, the

traditional, romantic symbol buth of the imagination and of

narcissism or self-love. In F.ltzgerald, the girl ls the

reflection of the herols antithetical, romantic imagination

and becomes both the American Dream and the American night­

mare. But she is also, in the beginning at least, the

mirror of the herols "self". The Fitzgerald hero exhibits

considerable narcissistic tendencies. He is a mirror-looker,

an egotist, and chooses the girl for her possession of

qualities that he, himself, does or would like to possesse

The girl, then, is the mirror of the man and their relation­

ship 15 that of "twins".

The "twin" quality that most attracts the hero to

60.

the girl is the romantic rebelliousness and necessary courage

to realize the infinite possibilities that life has te effer.

This mutual characteristic ls best described by Ardita of

"The Off-Shore Pirate":

Vou know ••• live been thinking aIl day that Vou and l ere somewhat alike. We're both rebels - only for different reasons. • •• But deep in us both was something that made ùs require more for happiness. • • • Courage - just that; courage as a rule of life, and something to cling to always - the liking what Vou always like; the utter .dis­regard for other people's opinions - just to live as l liked always and to die in my own way •• o. And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mi st that comes down on life - not only overriding people and cir­cumstances but overriding the bleakness of living. A sort of insistence on the values of life and the worth of transient things. ) (FP, p.35

~~ Although~not always expressed, each of the Fitzgerald girls

possesses this same passionate ambition to realize in their

lives some self more splendid than the self they were born

with. lt is this quality that supplies the mutual attraction

and sets up an equality between them. As Uncle George sa ys

in "The Pierian Springs and the Last Straw"; "We were equals,

neither was the leader. She was as interested in me as l

was fascinated by her" (AF, p.169).

In This Side gf Paradise, it is this same narcissism

in Rosalind and Amory that provides the basis for their ro-

mance. 5he is a mirror-looker like AmorYi that is how they

meet: "She go es up to the mirror and starts to dance in front

of it on the soft carpet. She watches not her feet, but her

eyes ~ never casually but always intently even when she

smiles. The door suddenly opens and then 91ams behind Amory,

61.

very cool and handsome as usual." (TSP, p.I?3) If Rosalind

is Amory's physical twin, Eleanor is his spiritual and in­

tellectual twin; "Was It the infini te sadness of her eyes

that drew hlm or the mirror of himself that he found ln

the gorgeous clarity of her mindl" (TSP, p.222) GloriaJof

The 8eautiful ~ Damned, is both Anthony's physical and his

intellectual double. Like Anthony, Glori~'s figure is

"boyish and s1im" (80, p.3?1) and she says she has a "man's

mind" (80, p.134). Anthony elaborates: "'Vou've got a mind

like mine. Not strongly gendered either way.'" Anthony

earlier remarks that, "'We're twins'." Their genders do

seem inextricably confusedj they are more like twins than

lovers.

Sometimes, however, the hero ls attracted by

qua11ties that he would like to but knows he does not possess.

Amory of This Side of Paradise "lacked somehow that intense

animal magnetism that so often accompanies beauty in men or

womenj his personality seemed rather a mental thing, and it

was not in his power to turn it on and off like a water

faucet" (TSP, p.60). Isabelle is a "match" for him in more

than the romantic sense of the term; "AlI impressions and,

in fact, aIl ideas were extremely kaleidoscopic to Isabelle.

• Flirt smiled from her large brown eyes and shone through

her intense physical magnetism" (TSP, p.63). In her Cqse the

magnetism does accompany beauty. Amory with his mental

capability and Isabelle with her animal magnetism make a

complementary pair.

62.

By aesuming the role as twin or complement to the

female, the Fitzgerald hero, however, is forsaking his male

prerogative to superiority. As a twin, there arises an

equality and as a complement there emerges the hint of an

inequality. Whether it is true or not, the hero understands

himself to be the inferior and the girl the superior. 5eeing

the girl with one thing he desires and does not possess, he

fatuously endows her with aIl the qualities that he deems

desirable. When the girl begins to exercise the power with

which he has endowed her, he becomes not her mirror but her

shadow. There is a virtual switching of roles - the hero

becomes the reflection of the girl. As a reflection or

shadow, the hero becomes smaller and smaller and elowly

loses hie ego.

This process of the shrinkage of the hero hinges on

th~ quality that makes Isabelle and Amory a complementary pair -

animal magnetism. Again and again the hero feels that he

somehow lacks sex appeal. In fact, he is afraid of sex. For

Fitzgerald, reality or experience most often means sexual

consummation. At the point of erotic communication, the hero

has strange Satanic visions and develops "loathing and disgust."

He rationalizes it by making the girl the embodiment of evil.

In This Side of Paradise, Amory "loves" Eleanor only for an

enchanted "afternoon". At the first hint of sexuality, Amory

63~

flees from her in panic. He retreats from experience and

reality and confuses it with evil. In The Beautiful and

Damned, Anthony actually has an affair with Dot during his

marriage. When it threatens ta become more than an affair,

he retreats from experience and regresses to the safety of

insanity. In "Sentiment and The Use of Rouge" the hero can

not accept the sexual revolution. To him sex is evil. Even

war is preferable ta sexual promiscuity. In This §iE! of

Paradise, the reaction of horror and revulsion ta any form of

sex is explained by a Puritan sensibility: "Nowa confession

will have ta be made: Amory had rather a Puritan conscience

. . . a puzzled, furtive interest in everything concerning

sex." (TSP, p.18) Because, then, of a well-developed Puritanism,

the hero cannot consummate his sexual desire and face reality

as a man. Instead of growing into sexual manhood and. experience

the hero retains his chastity and innocence.

One can see the graduaI diminution of the hero

throughout the body of Fitzgerald's early work. It is already

apparent in one of Fitzgerald's earliest unpublished plays,

"The Captured Shadow", deseribed by Donald Yates in his article

on Fitzgerald's apprenti ce fiction:

A mystery play with a pleasant little romance woven into the drama which is resolved with a good final line (a Fitzgerald trademark) wh en the "Captured Shadow", revealed as a celebrated society figure in disguise, admits that he has succumbed to the hero~nels charms and now is indeed a truly "captured" shadow. 8

4800nald A. Yates, "The Road ta Paradise, Fitzgera1d ' s Literary Apprenticeship", Modern Fiction Studies, VII, (Spring, 1961), p. 23.

64.

"Coward", a civil war play written in the summer of 1913,

has a simila~ theme:

A southernerwho in the first act demonstrates himself a coward is redeemed by curtaindrop in the sscond. The rssolution of a, long-pen ding romance provides the curtain line, as it did in ,"The Captured Shadow." Playing on the titIs of the drama, Fitzgerald has the hero Holworthy confess to having been - three years before - a ."coward" in romance as weIl as in battle.49

"The Debutante", another early play, depicts a bored, change-

able, pseudo-sophisticated society girl throwing over her

ardent beaux:

Helen: For Heaven's sake don't cry! John: Oh, l don't give a damn what l do. . . • John: l don't want anyone else. Helen Cscornfully): Vou,'re making a perfect fool of

yourself. CAF, p.99)

In the short story "The Pierian Springs and the Last Straw"

written at about the same time, the hero is again referred to

by the heroine as a "perfect fool". The narrator ev en admits:

"At any rate my Uncle's mood was now that of a naughty boy

ta a stern aunt, almost that of a dog ta his master" (AF,

p.172). Again and again the hero relinquishes his male

superiority and becomes a "coward", a "captured shadow".

In This Si de of Paradise, Amory ls dominated by his

mother. The first heading of the novel is appropriately "Amory,

Son of Beatrice" and Amory's father is described as "an in-

EffectuaI, inarticulate man" and an "unassertive figure" (TSP,

49.ll!..!.!1., p. 23.

65.

p.3). Amory, himself, is not athletic and possesses none of

the mascul{ne virtues; he has "a curious strain of weakness

• • • he posseased naither courage, perseverance, nor self-

respect" (TSP, p.19). Like the hero of "The Debutante",

Amory makes a "perfect fool" of himself and fails to assert

his supericrrity before Rosalind. He is never initiated into

manhood and his life becomes not the sub-total of his acts

of daring and courage, but the sub-total of his childish

romantic affairs.

Anthony Patch of ~ 8eautiful'~ Damned is an

older but not a more mature version of Amory Blaine. Neither

is he initiated into manhood. When he has the chance of

exhibfting his superiority he assumes the role of a passive,

unassertive male:

She had sent him away! That was the reiterated burden of his despair. Instead of seizing the girl and holding her by sheer strength until she became passive to his desire, instead of beating down her will by the force of his own, he had walked, defeated and powerless, from her door, with the corners of his mouth drooping and what force there might have been in his grief and rage hidden behind the manner of a whipped school-boy.

(80, p.IIS)

Even after their marriage, Anthony does not display a forceful,

dynamic masculinity: "Gloria knew within a month that her

husband was an utter coward toward any one of a million

phantasms ••• he was a coward under a shock and a coward

under a strain -" (80, p.IS7). Like the typical Fitzgerald

hero, Anthony may be intellectually and physically a man, but

emotionally he is still very much a boy.

66.

Always under the sharlow of a woman, the Fitzgerald

hero in fact "develops a "virility complex u , "an anxious desire

to appear masculine, and an extreme susceptibility on this

50 point." Hemingway, in his account of Fitzgerald in B Moveable Feast, attributes to Fitzgerald Just such a complexe

Although he neither played football nor went to war, Fitzgerald

was obsessed with these two manly pursuits:

As the twenties passed, with my twenties marching e little ahead of them, my two juvenile regrets - at not being big enough" (or good enough) to play football in college, and at not getting overseas during the war - resolved them­selves into childish waking dreams of imaginary heroism. 51

Two stories in his Apprentice Fiction are projections of this

"imaginary heroism" already discernible in Fitzgerald's ado-

lescent years. "Reade, Substitute Right Half" hes as its hero

a brave and successful football hero while "A Debt of Honor"

has as its hero a gallant, self-sacrificing soldier.

Like Fitzgerald, most of the later heroes neither

play football nor go to war. They do, however, reveal both

a deep regret and an unconscious fascination with these versions

of the modern hero. Carlyle of "The Off-Shore Pirate" regrets

that he was asked to entertain rather than fight during the

war: "It was not 50 bad except that when the infantry came

limping back from the trenches he wanted to be one of them.

The sweat and mud they wore seemed only one of those ineffable

symbols of aristocracy that were forever eluding him." (FP, p.29)

50Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, (London, 1951), p. 268.

51F• Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack Up, (New York, 1956), p. 70.

67.

In This Side of P.aradise, Amory's heroic visions of himself

focus on the football field~

Having decided to be one of the gods of the class, he reported for freshman football practice, but in the second week, playing quarterback, already paragraphad in corners of the Princetonian, he wrenched his knee seriously anough to put him out for the rest of the season. This forced him to retire and considar the situation.

(TSP, p.43)

Although Amory centres his attention alsewhere, he continues

to be fascinated wi th tha athletic hero. Isabelle lists 'some

of her current beaux, sorne of whom "bore athletic nemes that

made him look at her admiringly" (TSP, p.67). Amory does go

to war but not as a man. He stands in contrast to the ardent

patriotism of Kerry and the idealistic opposition of Burne:

"As he walked away it seemed to Amory that the look in his

face bore a great resemblance to that in Kerry's when he had

said good-by under Blair Arch two years before. ~mory

wondered unhappily why he could never go into anything with

the primaI honesty of those two" (TSP, p.149). Amory admires

the heroic soldier but he never becomes one.

Anthony Patch in The Beautiful and Damned neither

plays football nor fights in the war. When he is offered the

job of war correspondent, me refuses: "He had one of those

sudden flashes of illumination vouchsafed to aIl men who are

dominated by a strong and beloved woman, which show them a

world of harder men, more fiercely trained and grappling with

the abstractions of thought and war" (BD, p.206). Anthony

does enlist but even at army camp, his one chance to exhibit

68.

his virility, he retreats From the experience and allows him­

self to be dominated by a woman. The war is over before his

infantry unit is called and he misses the initiation of man-

hood. Anthony displays a virility complex in another way.

In the novel, there is one, very magnified and somehow signifi-

cant, instanBe of his desire to assert his own virility. During

a visit to one of their friends, Gloria demands to go ho~e but

Amory resists:

In his mind was but one idea - that Gloria was being selfish, that she was always being selfish and would continue to be unless here and now he asserted himself as her master. This was the occasion of aIl occasions, since for a whim she had deprived him of a pleasure. His determination solidified, approached momentarily a dull and sullen hate.

(BD, p.198)

Although Anthony finally does have his way, he has acute guilt

feelings about the whole incident:

While he did not believe she would cease to love him -this, of course, was unthinkable - it was yet problematical whether Gloria without her arrogance, her independence, her virginal confidence and courage, would be the girl of his glory, the radiant woman who was precious and charming because she was ineffably, triumphantly herself.

(BD, p.202)

By thus asserting his own virility, the hero fears that he

has~espassed on the heroine's territory.

The hero continues to shrink both in his own esteem

and in that of the heroine. Instead of growing into the world

of experience, the hero retreats back to the home. He for-

sakes his masculine will to vocation and assumes the feminine

will to idleness and pleasure. Rejected by Rosalind and de-

69.

prived of the home he wants, Amory in This Si de of Paradise

seeks not the world of action but the world of idleness. He

goes on a three week binge and finds refuge in the bar, the

American antitype of the home. Although as yet undecided,

Amory at the end of the novel is about to enter the world of

business and experience. He goes back to Princeton, the

only home he knows, and contemplatee his future:

- art, politics, religion, whatever his medium should be, he knew that he was safe now, free from aIl hysteria - • • • his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth - yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams. But - oh, Rosalindl •••

"It's aIl a poor substitute at best", he said sadly. (TSP, p.282)

Despite his protestations to the contrary, Amory does not sound

like a mature and independent man about to embrace the world

of business and success.

Like Fitzgerald, many of his heroes are writers of

one sort or another and their home becomes their office. AI-

though his multi-millionaire grandfather offers him the world

of business and adventure on a platter, Anthony Patch of The

Beautiful and Damned pre fers to be near Gloria and to indulge

in his inclination to idleness and pleasure. He refuses the

job offer as war correspondent and at army camp allows his

dut Y to become a minor interest. His one attempt at the busi-

ness world - as an insurance agent - is a miserable failure.

AfL81' a couple of unsuccessful attempts he resorts to alcohol.

Professed to be a writer, Anthony becomes more and more passive,

70.

more and more given to idleness and pleasure. Working at

home, he finds that Gloria had "lulled" his mind "to sleep.

She, who seemed of aIl women the wisest and finest, hung like

a brilliant curtain across his doorways, shutting out the

light of the sun" (BD, p.191). Gloria shows no interest in

his work and encourages his 10afing. Anthony blames the

slow-down of his mental activity on Gloria: "'And the ald mind

was working at top speed and now it's going round and round

like a cog-whee1 with nothing to catch it. As a matter of

fact l think that if l hadn't met Vou l would have done some­

thing. But Vou make leisure 50 subtly attractive ••• '" (BD,

p.2l1). Anthony capitulates to the enchantment.

The fate of another "writer", Uncle George of "The

Pierian Springs and the Last Straw", resembles close1y that

of Anthony Patch. As a bachslor, Uncle George is a dissolute

but an immensely popular novelist. He finally marries the girl

of his dreams, however, and his successful career is at an end:

"Uncle George never drank again, nor did he ever write or in

fact do anything except play a middling amount of golf and

get comfortably bored with his wife". (AF, p.173) In two

later stories the m8sculine will to vocation is threatened

to be subjected to the female will to leisure. In "Gretchen's

Fort y Winks" an advertising man has to slave for six weeks

to land a big contract. His wife, however, opposes his bringing

his work home, "She was a southern girl, and any question that

71.

had to do with getting ahead in the world always tended to

give her a headache" (JA, p.l76). In protest and Dut of

boredom, she taunts her huaband and goea eut caaually with

a "friend of the family ". Only by putting a sleeping potion

in her coffee, doea her husband aucceed in fulfilling his

contract and his masculine will. In "Hot and Cold Blood",

again the wife begrudgea her huaband for neglecting her. In

the end the huaband decides to devote less time to his work

and more time to his wife and home.

The hero's proceas of diminution, his revers ion from

experience and his search for seclusion in the home, however,

does not end here. There is in Fitzgerald's work a very

pronounced, if unconscious, regression to the childish state.

At the end of This Side of Paradise, Amory, now technically a

man, regresses to his adolescent home, Princeton, and to his

adolescent lover, Rosalind. The regression to childhood is

much more overt at the end of The Beautiful and Damned:

They found Anthony sitting in a patch of sunshine on the floor of his bedroom. Before him, open, were spread his three big stamp-books, and wh en they entered he was running his hands through a great pile of stamps that he had dumped from the back of one of them • • •. • 'What are Vou doing?' demanded Dick in astonishment. 'Going back to childhood 7 [; • • ] 'Shut the door when you go Dut.' He spoke like a pert child.

(BD, pp.446-7)

Anthony, unable and reluctant to cope with experience, represented

in the figure of Dorothy Raycroft, has begun to re-enaet his

childhood. Regressing to childish innocence and fantasy, he

has become a hebephrenic-schizophrenie.

.'

72.

The heroes of two short stories, like Anthony, become

the victims of insanity and they too revert to a childish state.

In "The Lees of Happiness", the hero, Jeffrey Curtain " •••

picked up an oak chair and sent it crashing through his own

front window. Then he lay down on the couch like a child,

weeping piteously and begging ta die. A blood clot the

size of a marble had broken in his brain". (JA, p.127)

Because of "uninterrupted toil upon his shoulders and the

recent pressure at home", Charles Hemple of "The Adjuster"

finds it difficult to accept the responsibilities of manhood.

His wife is "the weak point in what had otherwise been a strong-,

minded and well-organized career." With her demands of ex­

citement and pleasure, she precipitates his nervous collapse.

Their maid describes Mr. Hemplels childish behavior to his

wife:, "He came into the kitchen a while ago and began

throwing aIl the food out of the icebox, and now hels in

his room, crying and ~inging -"(JA, p.148). He too seeks

the comfort and security of childhood and shrinks from the

demands of reality.

Perhaps the most impressive example of this childish

regression is "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button". The central

narrative 1ine of the story is the reversaI of the growth

cycle. Benjamin is born an oId man and becomes progressively

younger. His is a life of "normal ungrowth" (JA, p.69). At

the age of twenty he marries,. As his wife grows older, however,

he grows younger; while 9he become9 more and more 'an aged

73.

woman, he becomes more and more like a young child. The

story ends with strong overtones of the Freudian return-to-

the womb:

He did not remember clearly whether the milk wes werm or cool at his last feeding or how the deys pessed - there was only his crib and Nana's familiar presence •••• Through the noons and nights he breethed and over him there were soft mumblings and murmurings that he scarcely heard, end faintly differentiated smells and light and darkness.

Then it was aIl dark, and his white crib and the dim faces thet moved above him and the warm sweet aroma of the milk, faded out altogether From his mind.

(JA, p.83)

Wrapped in warmth and security, the hero has returned to the

womb, his first home. The graduaI deterioration of the hero

is complete. The burdens of experience and reality are

avoided, the masculine will to action is absorbed in the

Feminine will to inaction, and that in turn to the will to

dissolution.

The development of the heroine is almost the reverse

of that of the hero. As the reflection of the hero's mind,

the girl, is forced to live up to the two mirror images, the

American Dream and the American nightmare, and becomes

schizophrenic in the process. Caught between two conflicting

reflections, she is doomed by males who insist on treating

her either as a goddess Dr as a bitch. By making her the

object of the two images, the hero does, in fact, deny her

very femininity. He invests her with a power which she does

74.

not have and gives her illusions of grandeur. The heroine

accepts this power reluctantly at first but gradually she

becomes dazzled and dizzied by its brilliance. In the end,

she passionately aspires for the very things thatare taboo

in a "man's world". Having been treated and worshipped like

an idol, she wants to make sure that she becomes one - and

in the process loses her femininity.

This defeminizing process takes place in the two

novelp. In ~ ~ of Paradise, Clara begins as the epitome.

of feminine charm. Even before the end of their relationship,

however, there is a parity and reversaI of mythic role.

Amory becomes Eve and Clara, Adam: "He asks her the one

thing that he knew might embarass her. lt was the remark

that the first bore made to Adam ••• 'Tell me about yourself.'

And she gave the answer that Adam must have given" LTSP, p.140).

Rosalind, intent upon having an equal if not an upper hand,

confesses to Amory: "l'm not really feminine, you know - in

my mind" (TSP, p.174). Eleanor too confesses to a masculine

mind and despairs of her femininity:

Oh, why am I a girl? ••• and here I am with the brains to do everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony. If 1 were born a hundred years from now, weIl and good, but now what's in store for me ••• I have to marry, that goes.without saying. - Who? l'm too bright for most men, and yet 1 have to descend to their level and let them patronize my intellect in order to get their attention.

(TSP, p.237)

It is exactly this patronizing attitude she is forced to

adopt, that the girl most objects to. In defiance, Gloria

75.

of The Beautiful ~ Damned insists with the others that she

has a "man's mind" (BD, p.134). Like Bernice, she bobs her

hair and emancipates and defeminizes herself.

In attempting to construct this parity with and

independence from the male, the first thing the girl rejects

is the home. She bitterly resants the traditional and auto­

matic association of the girl and the home. It implies the

very inferiority which, because of the hero, she feels she

do es not deserve. In rh!! ~ of Paradise, Rosalind refuses

Amory bacause she doesn't want to be "cooped up in a little

fIat" (TSP, p.195) thinking about "pots and kitchens and

brooms" (JSP, p.196). Eleanor thinks of marriage as a "sinking

ship" that will curb her fiery and independent spirit. In

The Beautiful and Damned Gloria does marry but she has an - -abhorrence of household and wifely duties. She hates cleaning,

cooking and laundry. To her the state of motherhood is

Inconvenient, repulsive, even bestial.

In "The Adjuster", this boredom with the home and

desire to get away From it becomes the central theme. Luella

Hemple, a young and beautiful wife, craves the excitement and

pleasure that her role as wife and mother fails to provide.

She detests both cooking and housework. When once she is forced

to do them she fe81s that "She was merely slumming today in

her own home, and she wasn't enjoying it. For her it was

merely a ridiculous exception" (JA, p.153). The role of

motherhood is no longer enough for fuifiiiment: "Even my

76.

baby bores me. That sounds unnatural, Ede, but it's true.

He doesn't begin to fill my life." (JA, p.14l) Luella, from

her domestic discontent, causes her husband to be bed-ridden.

Even the role of nurse, however, fails to draw her back to

her home.

Slowly but definitely the heroine absorbs the mascu-

line characteristics that the hero has forsaken. Like Bernice,

she adds eourage and daring to her feminine character. For

Ardita of "The Off-Shore Pirate", courage becomes a philosophy

of life, "My courage is faith - fa.ith in the eterna1 resi1ience

of me - that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity" (FP,

p.3S). When Gloria in The Beautiful and Damned discovers

her husbands cowardice: "Her reactions to it were not those

attributed to her sex - it raised her neither to disgust nor

to a premature feeling of motherhood. Herself almost com-

p1etely without physica1 fear, she was unable to understand."

(BD, p.lS7) Gloria fills the vacuum har husband has 1eft.

She adds independence and arrogance to her courage:

Because she was brave, because she was "spoiled," because of her outrageous and commendable independence of judge­ment, and finally because of her arrogant consciousness that she had never seen a girl as beautiful as herself, Gloria had developed into a consistent, practising Nietzschean.

CBD, p .161)

Instead of a superman, however, Gloria takes on the unmistakable

character of the superwoman.

In her new-found role as superwoman, the girl begins

to usurp not only manly characteristics but manly prerogatives.

??

She smokes, drinks, says "damn" and sven shoots craps. In

"The Lees of Happiness", "the young wives were smoking and

shouting their bets and being daringly mannish for those

days" (JA, p.125).

The girl becomes so dazzled with this novel power

that ~he assumes the masouline role as sexual aggressor. In

"Babes in"the Woods", it is Isabelle, not Kenneth, that makes

the first move towards sexual communication: "Isabelle wes

quite stirred - she wound her handkerchief into a tight baIl

and by the faint light that streamed over her, dropped it

deliberately on the floor. Their hands touched for an instant

but neither spoke" (AF, p.138). Isabelle, however, is passive

in comparison with the heroine of "The Pierian Springs and

the Last Straw": "When she wanted a boy there was no preliminary

scouting among other girls for information, no sending out of

tentative approaches meant ta be retailed ta him. There was

the most direct attack by every faculty and gift that she

possessed" (AF, p.168). Unlike the hero, the girl does not

retreat from experience or sex but actively pursues it. In

This Side of Paradise, Rosalind explains how the girl has

become the sexual aggressor:

There used ta be two kinds of kisses: first when girls were kissed and deserted, second, when they were engaged. Now there's a third kind, where the man is kissed and deserted. If Mr. Jones of the nineties bragged he'd kissed a girl, every one knew he was through with her. If Mr. Jones of 1919 brags the same way every one knows it's because he can't kiss her any more. Given a decent start any girl can beat a man nowadays.

(TSP, p.18l)

78.

The girl, in fact, holds such progressive and aggressive

opinions on sex that she ls willing to have extra-marital

relations. Gloria talks openly and freely on the subject:

"How 1 feel is that if 1 wanted anything l'd take it.

That's what l've always thought aIl my life. • • • 1 can't

be bothered resisting things 1 want." (BD, p.192) This

broad-minded liberal attitude is in stark contrast with her

husband's Puritan fear and revulsion.

Having proved her superiority in the sexual field,

the heroine moves into the world of business and commerce.

ln the beginning it is just idle talk as it is with Rosalind

in This Side of Paradise:

She: Oh, 1 do - but not in business hours. He: Business? She: Six to two - strictly. He: l'd like ta have sorne stock in the corporation. She: Oh, it's not a corporation - It's just "Rosalind,

Unlimited." Fifty-one shares, name, good-will, and everything go es at $25,000 a year.

He: (Oisapprovingly) Sort of a chilly proposition. (TSP, p.174)

Rosalind does in fact treat Amory's proposaI of marriage as

a business proposition and a "chilly" one: "No - no - l'm

taking the hardest course, the strongest course. Marrying

Vou would be a failure and 1 never fail - " (TSP, p.194).

The heroine develops a keen Interest in her husband's

financial matters. Jacqueline of "Hot and Cold Blood" dis-

approves of her husband's lending money gratis: "There was,

for instance, much money that he had lent privately, about

thirteen hundred dollars in aIl, which he realized, in his new

79.

enlightenment, he would never see again. It had taken

Jacquellne's harder, Feminine intelligence to know this." ,\ If

(JA, p.168) Roxanne in The Lees of Happiness actually handles

her husband's financial responsibilities: "It was she who

paid the bills, pored over his bankbook, corresponded with

his publishers." (JA, p.l27)

Money, in the hands of the woman, in fact becomes a

. weapon for domination over the male:

When life gets a hold of a brainy man of fair education, that is, when he marries he becomes, nine times out of ten, a conservative as far as existing social conditions are concerned. He may be unselfish, kind-hearted, even just in his own way, but his first job ls to provide and hold fast. His wife shoos him on, From ten thousand a year to twenty thousand a year, on and on, in an enclosed treadmill that hasn't any windows. Hels donel Life's got himl He.'s no helpl He's a spiritually married man.

(TSP, p.271)

Women's financial and social ambitions demasculinize the men

and defeminize the women:

Unfortunately the spiritually married man, as a by-product of his money chase, has garnered in the great newspaper, the popular magazine, the influ~ntial weekly - so that Mrs. Newspaper, Mrs. Magazine, Mrs. Weekly can have a better limousine than those oil people across the street or those cement people round the corner.

(TSP, p.272)

52 Fitzgerald's girls become those "preposterous, pushing women"

that 50 disgusted him with the American female in P.aris. The

golden girl becomes a gold digger.

52 Andrew Turnbull, ed., The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 351.

80.

The girl, in fact, assumes the masculine will to

vocation. Thus endowed with the power of money, she begins

to adopt a hard, domineering business attitude. In "0 Russet

Witch", Olive is a wage-earner just like her fianc~. 5he

treats their impending marriage as a business transaction,

in which she is the controlling concern: "lt wes not until

the next dey that she told him about the wedding - how she

had moved the date forward: it was much better that they

should be married on the first of May." (JA., p .104) Caroline

of the same story is a one-time dancer-turned-millionairess

who dabbles in the stock market. After ordering her broker

to sell and promptly dismissing him, she proceeds to dominate

and tyrannize her grandson:

You think l'm senile. You think l'm soft. l'm not! 5he struck herself with her fist as though to prove that she was a mass of muscle and sinew. "And 1=11 have more brains left when you've got me laid out in the drawing room sorne sunny day than the rest of them were born with.

(JA, P .115)

Caroline sounds more like a hardened, authoritarian business

man than a dignifled old lady.

In "0 Russet Witch" the man still retains his will

to vocation but in The Beautiful ~ Damned Anthony Patch has

abandoned it. In it, Gloria appropriates this masculine

role. Frustrated by their lack of money, she suggests be-

coming the bread winner. Her greatest aspiration ia to become

a movie star:

UBlockhead said he'd put me in - only if l'm ever going to do anything l'Il have to start now. They only want young women. Think of the money, Anthony!­

"For you - yeso But how about me?" "Don't Vou know that anything 1 have is yours too?"

(BD, p.306)

81.

Feeling his masculinity threatened, Anthony violently puts

an end to it. When Anthony is away at army camp, however,

Gloria clandestinely pursues her dream as a film star:

When Mr. Haight told her that the trial would not take place until autumn she decided that without telling ~nthony she would go into the movies. When he saw her successful, both histrionically and financially, when he saw that she could have her will of Joseph Bloeckman, yielding nothing in return, he would lose his silly prejudices. 5he lay awake half one night planning her career and enjoying her successes in anticipation, and the next morning she called up "Film Par Excellence".

(BD, p.369)

Just before her twenty-ninth birthday, Gloria has a screen

test. With shock and despair she discover~ that she has failed

the test. Her visions of idolatry turn out to be delusions of

grandeur. She does not have the capacity to fulfill the co-

lossal image that the hero has created for her. The image

collapses and she ewakes to find the qualities that gave her

her power - her youth, her beauty, and her dynamism -

perceptibly slip away. The girl resigns herself to become

an indifferent, bewildered and unhappy woman and, like Gloria,

either ends as"a grotesque similitude of a housewife" (BD,

p.424) or as a cheapened, hardened woman. She is left like

her husband with nothing but the ruins of a fantastic dream.

This process of role reversaI and imminent ruin is

82.

succinctly illustrated in a story entitled "Head and Shoulders".

In it an infant prodigy destined to intellectual fame is se-

duced by a young and beautiful singer-dancer. The hero abandons

his academic career and marries the girl. Because of her

agile body and his fertile mind, they calI themselves "h~ad

and shoulders". The girl, however, earns much more money

than he does and out of resentment he looks around for extra

employment. Just as his wife becomes pregnant, he discovers

a talent at gymnastics. His wife suggests, "Vou do sorne

giant swings for me and l'Il chase some culture for you" (FP,

p.88). The result is a complete reversaI of role. She writes

a non-literary but best-selling book "Sandra Pepys, Syncopated"

and he becomes a trapeze artist at the Hippodrome. The hero

comes home one day to find his intellectual idol come to

visit not him, but his wife. The final irony appears in a

newspaper clipping~

Marcia Tarbox's connection with the stage is not only as a spectator but as the wife of a performer. She was married last year to Horace Tarbox, who every evening delights the children at the Hippodrome with his wondrous flying-ring performance. lt ls said that the young couple have dubbed themselves Head and Shoulders, referring doubtless to the fact that Mrs. Tarbox supplies the literary and mental qualities, while the supple and agile shoulders of her husband cantribute their share ta the family fortunes.

(FP, p.9S)

Their ruin is hinted at by the hero himself: "Paor gauzy

souls trying to express ourselves in something tangible.

Marcia with her written book; l with my unwritten ones. Trying

to choose Dur mediums and th en taking what we get - and

being glad." (FP, p.93) The man sacrifices his greatest asset,

83.

his mind, for his body and the girl sacrifices her most

praiseworthy quality, her body, for her mind. Both his body

and her mind are perishable and inadequate vessels for their

respective sexes. The objects that the American society

offers the romantic imagination are gorgaous but gaudy

images at beste

CHAPTER V

CONCLUSION

In the early short staries and in the first two

novels, then, the girl is the imaginative centre of Fitz­

gerald's vision. As the quintessence of youth, beauty,

innocence, wealth and popularity, she is, in the beginning,

bath the embodiment of the American Dream and the Fair

Heroine. This highly idealistic conception of the girl,

however, is as frail as it is all-embracing. When it is

threatened, as it is by sex, marriage or the fading of her

assets, the image collapses and the girl becomes the

embodiment of the American nightmare and the Dark Heroine.

80th the dream and the nightmare image invest the girl with

a power which, in actuallty, she does not possess. ~s a

result of this power, there ls a virtual exchange of roles:

the man retreats from the girl, shrinks from experience, takes

refuge in the home, and accepts an inferior position, and the

girl does just the opposite - she seeks the man, embraces

85.

experience, moves from the home to the office, and acquires

the dominant role. The girl, however, has neither the mind

nor the fortitude to fulfill this power and, like the man,

she ends in despair and ruine

In his Barly work F.itzgerald actually prophesied

his own life. The dream, the nightmare, the role reversaI

and the ruin èventually touched Fitzgerald as vividly and

as poignantly as they touched his characters. In a letter

to his daughter in July 7, 1938, he wrote:

Wh en l was your age l lived with a great dream. The dream grew and l learned how to speak of it and make people listen. Then the dream divided one day when l decided to marry your mother after aIl, aven though l knew she was spoiled and "meant no good to me. l was sorry immediately l had married her but, being patient in those days, made the best of it and got to love her in another way. You came along and for a long time we made quite a lot of happiness out of our lives. But l was a man divided - shs"wanted me to work too much for her and not enough for my dream. She realized too late thët work was dignity, and the only dignity, and tried to atone for it by working hers~lf, but it was too late and she broke and is broken forever. 53

Like the F.itzgerald heroine, lelda decided upon a vocation and

frantically pursued her dream of becoming a great ballerina.

She too was lnadequate; "She didn't have the strength for

the big stage - sometimes she pretended, and pretended

beautifully, but she didn't have it u •54 lelda finally had

a nervous breakdown and spent the remainder of her life

under psychiatrie care. Fitzgerald's middle age was not much

53 Ibid ., ~. 47.

54 Ibid ., p. 47.

•

86.

happier: ~It was too late for me to recoup the damage - 1

had spent most of my resources, spiritual and material, on

her, but 1 struggled on for five years till my health

collapsed, and aIl 1 cared about was drink and forgetting ll •55

For the most part, Fitzgerald neglected his literary talent

and devoted his energies to alcohol, Hollywood and the motion

pictures. In 1940, Fitzgerald died of a heart attack, a

forgotten writer, and seven years later his wife accidentally

burned to death in a sanitarium. The imminent disaster that

pervades his work was realized in his own life.

Fitzgerald was not only the prophet of his own ~ife

but also the prophet of his own societ~. As he predicted,

with the emancipation of the woman, there is not an equality

but a reversaI of roles. Possessed of the power of wealth

and beauty, the American woman becomes the aggressor and the

dominE~ring figure. The man accepts almost willingly this

subjection to the girl. America, the second paradise, becomes

regressive and inverted - a matriarchal society:

A land where the rulers have minds like little children and the law-givers believe in Santa Claus; where ugly women control strong men - • • •• Ves, it is truly a melancholy spectacle. Women with receding chins and shapeless noses go about in broad daylight saying "00 thisl" and 'liDo thatl ri

and aIl the men, even those of great wealth, obey implicitly their women to whom they refer sonorously either as "Mrs. 50 and 50" or as "the wife"

(BD, p.28)

The American girl not only loses her golden hair but also

her white dresse 5he becomes a dark girl who "wears the pants" •

55 Ibid ., p. 47.

87.

Fitzgerald has captured or anticipated the effect of the

emancipated woman - the dramatic reversaI or confusion of

sexual roles and the transformation of America from a

patriarchal to a matriarchal society.

88.

Index ta Abbreviations

AF The Apprentice Fiction of E. Scott Fi tzgerard', 1909-1917, ed. John Kueh1, Brunswick, N. J., 1965.

FP F1appers and Phi1osophers. New York, 1959.

JA Six Tales of the ~ Age and Other Stories. New York, 1960.

TSP This ~ of Paradise. New York, 1960.

BD The Beautifu1 and Damned. New York, 1960.

89.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primarv Sources

The Apprentice Fiction of [. Scott Fitzgerald, 1909-1917, ed. John Kuehl, Brunswick, N. J., 1965.

F1appers and Phi1osophers. New York, 1959.

Six Tales of the Jazz Age SD& Other Stories. New York, 1960.

This Side of Paradise. New York, 1960.

The Beautiful !DE Damned. New York, 1960.

The Crack~. ed. Edmund Wilson, New York, 1965.

The Letters of [. Scott Fitzgerald. ed. Andrew Turnbu11, Harmondsworth, England, 1968.

Secondary Sources

Anon, "The Beautifu1 Rich", The Times Literary Supplement, October 17, 1958.

Bewley, fltlarius, The Eccentric Design. New York, 1963.

Bode, Carl ed., The Young Rebel in American literature. New York, 1955.

Brooks, C1eanth, "The American 'Innocence' in James, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner", Shenandoah XVI, Autumn, 1964.

Chase, Richard, The American Novel and its Tradition. Garden City, New York, 195~---

Eble, Kenneth, [. Scott Fitzgerald. Twayne's United States Authors Series, New Haven, 1963.

Fiedler, Leslie A., Love and Death in the American Novel. New York, 1966.--- -- ---

Liebling, A. J., "Amory, We're Beautifull", New Yorker, XXVII May 19, 1951.

Miller, James E., F. Scott Fitzgerald, His Art ~ His Technigue. New York, 1967.

90.

Mizener, Arthur, ed., f. Scott F.itzgerald, ~ Collection of Critical Essays, Englawood Cliffs, 1963.

------- The Far Side of Paradisa. Boston, 1951.

Mizaner, Arthur, "Scott Fitzgerald and the Top Girl", The Atlantic Monthly, CCVII, March, 1961.

Morris, Wright, The Territory Ahead. New York, 1958.

O'Hara, John, "Introduction". The Portable f.. Scott Fitzgerald. New York, 1965. -

Piper, Henry Dan, f. Scott Fitzgerald, ~ Critical Portrait. New York, 1965.

Praz, Mario, The Romantic Agony. London, 1951.

Shain, Charles E., f. Scott Fitzgerald. Minneapolis, 1967.

Turnbu11, Andrew, Scott Fitzgerald. New York, 1962.

Yates, Donald A., "The Road to Paradise, Fitzgerald's Literary Apprenticeship", Modern Fiction Studies, VII, 5pring, 1961.